Laughing the Language

existing in the same time zone as you were the day before. 

And yet, as soon as my feet touched the ground outside of the Marseille airport, I became jolted awake. The air was different in France, and it wasn’t a gradual realization I had overtime. It was a sudden burst of color, a silent firework you feel sparking in your heart as you find a seat on the bus and begin the hour drive to the place you’ll call home for the next month, the place you’ll want to continue calling home even after you leave.  

When we reached Aix, I remember getting off the bus slowly, retrieving my suitcase in what felt like slow motion as I looked around and realized, this is it.  

I didn’t know who to walk towards because I only had a vague idea of what my host mom looked like, and I didn’t know if she even spoke the same language as me. One of the professors called out to me and motioned for me to walk towards her, a shorter woman wearing heels and an outfit that made me feel underdressed was standing beside her.  

“This is Isabelle,” the professor said, motioning to the shorter woman. “She’s your host mom!”  

“Bonjour,” she said. “C'est un vrai plaisir de te rencontrer enfin. Je suis ravie de faire plus ample connaissance avec toi au cours du mois à venir! Comment se sont passés vos voyages?” 

“Um . . .  oui?” I replied.  

Isabelle laughed and turned to my professor.  

“Isabelle does not speak any English,” my professor said. “So we’ll have to just figure out another way for you guys to communicate.” 

There were two other people living in the same homestay as me, and thankfully one of them spoke a lot better French than what I did. We also discovered that Isabelle was learning Spanish (and I had thankfully taken four years of Spanish in high school, as well as a semester of it in my freshman year of college). That night, we sat around the dinner table eating in complete silence. There would be brief moments of conversation between Isabelle and my classmate who spoke French, but our conversations were limited due to the language barrier and our exhaustion. 

The food was delicious and even though it was only the first night there, I knew the rest of the month would be filled with the best food I had ever eaten. We went back to our rooms shortly after we had finished helping put the dishes in the kitchen and as I looked around the apartment, I realized how odd it was that I would be calling this place home. This random apartment in a random French city with people who, before this trip, were random to me.  

I walked straight to the bedroom I would be staying in and shut the door behind me. I looked around at the room, the pale brown walls and wooden bookshelves that held our toiletries and towels, the wooden wardrobe standing right next to my mattress which was covered in a green and white striped comforter.  

I took my phone out of my pocket and called my best friend, needing to experience some sense of familiarity. As soon as I heard his voice, I burst into tears.  

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you okay?” 

“I need to get on a plane to come back,” I choked out. “I can’t do this. I thought I could, but I can’t.”  

There was a long pause, filled with a deep sigh from his end of the call and short, choppy breaths from mine. 

“Well, I hate to break it to you . . . but you’re kinda stuck there.”  

“What?!” 

“Yeah, I mean you’re not stuck necessarily, but you definitely can’t come back right now, nor do I think you should.” 

There was another long pause as I processed what he had said, as I tried to think logical thoughts instead of emotional ones.  

“Look,” he continued, “you’re only going to be there for a month. A month is not actually very long, and you literally just got there. Give it some time, and then if it still sucks, maybe the school will buy you an early plane ticket home, but that’s a pretty big maybe.” 

“What if I can’t do it?” I asked.  

“What if you can?” he replied. “I don’t think you’ll ever forgive yourself if you give up on this experience before it’s even really had the chance to start.”  

***

The next morning, I woke up early, which was surprising given the amount of exhaustion I had been facing the night before. I was truly out of it, and because I hadn’t been paying attention to my surroundings, I at first felt like I was lost as I woke up in what would soon start to feel like my room.  

I was laying on top of the blanket with my phone clutched in my right hand, and I realized that I didn’t even remember falling asleep. I was so tired I had probably just fallen into bed and drifted off as I was still on the phone with my friend. As I rolled out of bed and walked out towards the bathroom–or at least part of the bathroom, since the toilet and sink/shower were in separate rooms–the rich smell of fresh coffee drifted towards me, and I curiously made my way out into the kitchen.  

“Bonjour,” Isabelle said, putting out three cups of coffee with a small pitcher of milk and a plate with a single slice of toast.  

“Bonjour,” I replied, wiping the sleep from my eyes as I reminded myself that English would no longer be serving me well.  

I walked over to the table and began to sit down, but stopped as soon as I looked outside and saw the sun peeking over the mountains. I hadn’t realized it the night before, but there was a large balcony outside Isabelle’s apartment and the only thing separating us from the morning sky was a wall of glass. The sun had already risen for the most part, but there were still hints of sunrise resting on the horizon. Splashes of purples, reds, and oranges dotted the sky like paint. As I sat down at the table, coffee in one hand and toast in the other, I continued to look at the view with eyes that were no longer fatigued or fogged by a day and half worth of travel. I could clearly see the beauty of not just the sky, but the simple moment when you sit down for breakfast with people you don’t know, and drink a cup of coffee made by a woman who you also don’t know, but who you deeply trust anyways. We were all strangers to each other then. And yet, that was the moment I knew I would be okay.  

It was also the moment when I knew I had experienced love at first sight.  

***

Later that day, after we had already attended class and explored as much as the city as we possibly could, we came home to Isabelle dancing in the living room with her cat, Tyna, and French music loudly playing from a speaker. The smell of pasta wafted towards the door from the kitchen where Isabelle had already started cooking dinner.  

That night, we feasted on homemade pasta with fresh tomato sauce and bread from the market with brie cheese and lavender honey. It was as if I were eating for the first time. And somehow, despite only having been there for a day, I felt at home.  

Although it was difficult to communicate with Isabelle and her daughter, we still got to know each other in ways that went beyond having a surface level conversation. We would talk about anything from what we were studying to what we wanted to do in our future careers to how we felt about current global events to our deepest and darkest fears. We didn’t speak with the same words, but we did speak with the same intention of getting to know one another better.  

We even developed a system. If Isabelle didn’t know how to say something in Spanish, she would tell it to our friend who spoke French who would then translate and repeat the message back to us (and the same applied to Isabelle’s daughter as well). If Isabelle said something in Spanish, then me and my other classmate would work together to decipher exactly what she said as well as how to respond. The system was quite simple and didn’t take long to put into effect.  

And most importantly, it worked.  

At any given moment, there would be three different languages spoken around the dinner table. Our efforts became consistent actions, which eventually became habitual. Dinner was always one of my favorite parts of the day in Aix, simply because I felt more at home with those people and in that environment than what I had ever felt before.  

One night in particular that always stands out to me, is the first night we decided to play Skip-Bo.  

Skip-Bo is a card game that is very similar to Uno (and gets just as competitive just as quickly). After a brief introduction to the rules of the game and a struggle to shuffle and deal the cards, we began to play.  

Seconds became minutes became hours and suddenly, it was two in the morning and we still had no intention of going to sleep anytime soon.  

The reason why this memory stands out to me so much isn’t just because of the sense of community and belonging that I felt in that moment, but because we were laughing constantly, and we were even able to laugh at the things we could not understand. Isabelle’s daughter would tease her for getting the “6” and the “9” cards confused, and it eventually became an ongoing joke where we would all try to make our “6” cards a “9” or one of our “9” cards a “6” so that we could win the game faster. We were laughing at one another even as we were saying things that we didn’t completely understand.  

We were complete goofballs, and I had never laughed so hard in my entire life.  

We would ruthlessly sabotage one another to purposefully keep the game going and even once someone had finally won and the game came to an end, we’d just reshuffle and redeal. And this became an ongoing activity for us.  

We’d play Skip-Bo when there was nothing for us to do and when there was everything to do. We’d laugh at one another every time, poking fun at our shared competitiveness and the lack of mercy we had for each other in the game. We’d play before dinner and after dinner, before class and after class. One time we even started a game of Skip-Bo after we had gotten back from the bar at three in the morning. 

It didn’t matter what time of day it was or what items were waiting to be checked off of our to-do lists. We made time for each other.  

Perhaps that’s really the only way to productively spend one’s time.  

***

We played Skip-Bo one last time the day before leaving.  

And even though we were still laughing and having a fun time just like any other night when we’d play, I felt an overwhelming sense of both dread and relief for leaving.  

Simply put, I didn’t want to leave France.  

But at the same time, I missed everything and everyone who I knew was patiently waiting for my return.  

I felt guilty for not calling people back in the U.S. more often. It was as if I had forgotten that there was still a world outside Aix, a world that was still turning with all my friends and family on it. But on the flip side of that, I would always feel guilty for taking the time to call people from back in the U.S. because I worried it would take too much time away from the new experiences I was having. I was stuck between wanting to be there for the people I left behind and wanting to keep building and creating memories in a new country.  

Time was of the essence and if I could’ve just cloned myself, so that I could have been fully present in both of those places at once, then that guilt and shame might’ve faded away. But instead, I was left in a tug-of-war, being pulled in one direction towards the only place I had ever known and in another direction towards the place I had grown to love more than anything.  

They say love conquers all, but I don’t know that it did for me.  

Because I came back.  

***

I left the U.S. with a suitcase full of belongings, and came back with a larger sense of belonging, one I had never experienced before. I was so afraid of forgetting to pack something I needed before we left the U.S., but in France I found everything I needed. And that’s the saddest thing that no one ever warns you about when you go abroad.  

You spend so much time laboring over what to pack, how many pairs of underwear you’ll need, which chargers you’ll want to bring on the airplane, etc. But when you leave those places behind, you realize that you can’t pack the things you never knew you needed.  

You can’t shove your French host mom in a suitcase with her cat and daughter. You can’t brew a cup of vanilla coffee and wrap your hands around the warm mug when you’re 42,000 feet in the air, nor can you eat fresh Mediterranean strawberries for dinner outside an ornate museum that looks more like a chateau. You can’t pack the food, the people, the memories, or the feeling of saltwater lapping at your feet as an old French couple walks past you, holding hands tightly, as if they know they’ll lose something by letting go.  

I think about that couple a lot, even now. The way they laughed with one another, and the way I understood their laughter without having to know a single word they had actually said. 

I am in the U.S. now, but a part of me is still back in Aix, still laughing at the table with Isabelle and her daughter and Tyna and the classmates I became closer with throughout that month. I still laugh now, but it’s not the same. It’s never the same.  

Because I’m no longer laughing the same language.  

But I think there’s a lot of beauty in being able to cherish those memories and know you’ll never get that experience back. I know I’ll probably play Skip-Bo again, but never with the same people, and never around the same table where there are at least three languages being spoken at any given time. I guess that’s just the thing about laughter and travel. You can laugh and laugh ‘til you’re blue in the face, but the moment is temporary.  

You’ll always inevitably have to pause in order to breathe.  

***

I’ll never forget the day we left Aix, how Isabelle wiped tears from her eyes as she dropped us off at the bus where the rest of our classmates and professors were waiting. I’ll never forget the way she hugged me and kissed my cheek, the way she smiled sadly as we walked towards the bus with our luggage in hand.  

“Au revoir,” she said to me, waving goodbye. She said something else in French to my friend who knew the language much better than me.  

My friend turned back to me, smiling.  

“She says we can always come back to visit.”  

I looked at Isabelle and nodded before giving her one last hug and walking towards the bus. I turned back, wanting to say something meaningful and sappy, but simply not having the French vocabulary to do so. And so, I said one thing with the vocabulary I did have.  

“Au revoir, Isabelle. I’ll say bonjour again soon.”