{"id":211,"date":"2004-06-07T13:46:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-07T13:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/2004\/06\/07\/nihongo\/"},"modified":"2004-06-07T13:46:00","modified_gmt":"2004-06-07T13:46:00","slug":"nihongo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/2004\/06\/07\/nihongo\/","title":{"rendered":"Nihongo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>He said all he needed to say in a language that sounds like nonsense in Spanish to those who don&#8217;t speak it. He said it, and his hands flew around a space that seemed the exact distance between his soul and mine. In the process, he pulled my heart a little closer.<\/p>\n<p>All I know is <em>I understood<\/em>, even if the words weren&#8217;t clear. I understood, and I felt an immense necessity then: I <em>had<\/em> to learn that language that made it all so tender, even if the process meant saying goodbye for a while to the man who seemed to own those sounds.<\/p>\n<p>Now that I&#8217;m finally identifying certain foreign noises as familiar words, as I&#8217;m able to answer a few questions, as my paintbrush tries hard to emulate drawings that have been long accepted as representations of ideas, I find \u2014to my dreamy heart&#8217;s despair\u2014 that this language wasn&#8217;t created exclusively for two lovers from opposite sides of the planet. People actually learn it and use it for many more reasons than simply lulling a soul to sleep the sleep of dreams come true.<\/p>\n<p>It has been difficult to assimilate the fact that my view on three sets of characters will never be close to reality. No matter how bitter I feel every time I hear sentences that sound like human reruns of colorful animated cartoons, there is nothing I can do to change the course of facts: I learned a language that more than one hundred twenty-eight million people speak day by day, a language that is synonymous with incredibly advanced technology, bizarre live drawings representing havoc, and an infinite horde of slanted eyes spread about four main islands that could as well be a completely different planet.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m too na\u00efve if I think this demonic language of puzzles could ever mean to my side of the world exactly what it means to me: <strong>love<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>He said all he needed to say in a language that sounds like nonsense in Spanish to those who don&#8217;t speak it. He said it, and his hands flew around a space that seemed the exact distance between his soul and mine. In the process, he pulled my heart a little closer. All I know [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}