What the Silence Knew—A triptych in borrowed tongues
by RyunGie Hahn
I. The First Language
Before I knew words,
I had gestures.
A palm laid flat on a table.
A glance toward the door,
as if longing were directional.
They called it quiet.
I remember flood.
When language came,
It did not come kindly.
It came with teeth.
It came with rules disguised as lullabies.
Say it this way, they said,
and you will be understood.
Say it that way,
and you will not belong.
So I folded my voice
Into the nearest available syntax—
Tight, uncreased,
Like a uniform folded with care
but never worn by choice.
Each word starched against my ribs. Each sentence a pin.
I learned to rehearse
What I had not lived
and to name things
In the order someone else believed them.
There was a day I stood
Before a question I could not answer.
Not for lack of meaning—
But because meaning
Refused to wear the words I knew.
I said what they wanted.
They nodded.
And I felt the first fracture open
Like the first thread pulled from a sleeve,
Already setting the cloth to unravel.
Small. Invisible.
But irreversible.
Later, I came back to the moment
and rewrote it in the language
That stayed closer to the chest.
I let it breathe.
I let it break form.
I let it stutter. I let it bleed.
And I wept—
Not for what I had said,
But for what had been said in my place.
They called it fluency.
I called it mimicry.
They called it growth.
I called it escape.
Now, I measure my voice
Not by clarity
But by temperature.
How close can I speak
Before I burn?
And if I burn—
not into ash
but into utterance—
will anyone hear
the silence crackling
to relearn its first name?
II. Where Breath Forgot How to Speak
We do not touch the world.
We touch the names stitched to its skin.
The word is not the wound.
The name—spoken—
is not the burn.
Language is not memory’s spine.
But it carries the heat of it
One language
Lets me pose my thoughts
Like fruit in a still life.
Stiff.
Arranged.
Glossed by velvet restraint.
The other
Rips through the diaphragm
Without asking—
You were always
Always
This raw.
They call it fluency.
But I feel like a translation
Of a self
That never wrote its original.
In one tongue,
I hold my breath so long
the ribs forget they can break.
Still.
Tight as glass.
No ripples.
In the other—
Fracture.
The sentence
folds
inward—
Misses its
end.
Forgets
how
to
be.
I am all
edge.
Somewhere between grammar’s prison
and the wilderness of grief,
I learned to wear clarity
Like a pressed shirt.
But the ache,
the ache,
knows
knows
knows the cracks I paint over.
III. The Mood That Ate the Moon
There was a name I once whispered
through the seam of my jaw—
the warmth I once bit back
a story knotted into my chest
Like the red thread
Stitched inside the lining of an old coat.
But when I sought it in the other tongue,
It slipped—
Thinned into condensation on glass.
It didn’t wound the same.
Didn’t stay.
The sky that night
wasn't metaphor.
It was pitch.
A cold tide
with no moon to soften it.
And the mood—
That shadowed thing—
Rose from my breath
and swallowed the moon whole.
Call it subjunctive longing.
Call it the cost of being split
between the voice I remember
and the one I rehearse.
I kept speaking—
a liturgy of braces and beams,
of scaffolds without scripture,
syntax without shelter,
words echoing where the roof once was.
Translation wounds quietly.
Not in what it loses,
but in how it changes
just enough
to survive.
Now I tell the story
With nouns softened by revision.
With verbs that don’t reach
for pulse.
But late at night,
when grammar untethers itself,
I still feel the name—
Not in my mouth,
but in the way my ribs close in—
as if they were built to protect
what they cannot hold—
the ember that refused
to become ash.