By Ana Giovinazzo

When I first traveled here, I assumed the amount of effort I put into learning the language would serve me well enough to get my start. Many immigrants have moved to new places with less: a fragile grasp on grammar, with subjects, objects, and verbs splattered like paint on a modern artist’s canvas. Beautiful in their inherent uniqueness, but inconsistent, with no ordered prism in the ROYGBIV of a rainbow, but instead, VOYBRIRYOOVIGRY, like a technicolor scream.

I’d prepared for the linguistic differences. I knew how to conjugate (in forty tenses!), how to pluralize (they didn’t), and how to append adjectives and adverbs to nouns and verbs (bizarrely lumped together in a multicolored blob at the end of each clause, like verb participles in German). In German: “I have quickly and excitedly a red, round ball thrown.” In this foreign tongue: “One ball I have thrown quickly excitedly red round.” 

Despite my extended study, the piece of that sentence I haven’t grasped is “red.” 

This society sees in more colors than mine can. They are to their planet what mantis shrimp are to ours. These beings are humanoid in features, but with enormous, opalescent eyes. I hesitate to describe them further, lest I accidentally offend by misrepresenting a hue. 

In layman’s terms, this society, this species on this planet, exhibits a form of synesthesia, whereby colors are assigned to everything: sounds, feelings. Nouns refer to the objects you would expect, but every word has its own hue, and every color represents more than just a color. Because of that, no matter how long I live here, I will always be a foreigner.

When I barter at their market today, I inevitably ask someone for something that, in English, on Earth, has a simple description. “I would like that sweater knitted green,” I tell them. The shopkeeper holds out their arm to gesture to an entire wall of sweaters, only one of them, to my eyes, green.

If I were a native speaker, I never would have described the article of clothing so imprecisely. Green, like grass. Green, like a Granny Smith. I would have described the feelings it evoked.

I would have used a tone that depicted the comfort and familiarity of the green plaid wallpapered game room of the local tavern, where my friends cavorted over billiards at the felt pool table. Where we tucked an array of verdant bills, ones and fives, under the clipboard for our server, and where I’d add a slip of paper with my phone number and a nervous message. “No obligation, but call me?” Where I’d glimpse the brief sparkle of her emerald earring as she leaned past me to collect the monetary notes and my note and tuck them all into her tarragon-colored apron to count out later. The evergreen dresses on her bridesmaids, planted at her side like pine trees, as we said our vows. The flannel sheets, the same hue and pattern as that mossy tavern wallpaper, decades later, as she lay in hospice.

That is the green I need. I need the green of that feeling, the sweater of those memories. And if I knew those words, could pronounce that tone, I would have asked the shopkeeper for it with them, my accent flawless, my grammar impeccable.

But I don’t.

So I point. 

The green sweater becomes mine.