_I am listening to her cry through a story. She speaks calmly to our class, but in her words I can hear her sobbing through the sibilants, choking on the periods and commas. The sentences curl into themselves and fall to the floor, the way she did in the story she is telling. “You never knew” she repeats again, and I feel like she is talking to me. She moves on. The story sighs and its corners turn upward into a smile. She moves from crying to laughing, covering everything in between.

_Her story is sickly sweet, burning and intoxicating like some foreign liquor. She describes her life outside of America in English, but I can hear the foreign accents that underly her words. It amazes me that the words I am familiar with can seem so new. This reinvention is wonderful. She is right, though, I never knew until then that it could happen, that English could be used so beautifully to talk about a life outside of America.

_Here in America we seem to have lost the understanding of translation. We find it fascinating when people from other countries use our language to such effect, or change that language. We find foreign words and languages to be exotic and enticing. No one finds English very interesting, because everyone knows it.

_Americans export all of the things that they use to define themselves. Fast food, television, blue jeans, the English language itself, are some of America’s chief exports. This has happened on such a large scale that we consider cultures unfamiliar with American culture to be backwards. We discount as uneducated the millions of people that do not understand American customs, or do not speak English.

_American culture is so known to the world that it can never be foreign. My words could never have the same effect on others, that of telling someone of a culture they’ve never known, as hers did.

_Instead, we plug in and we cry over the internet. We sob through sound cards, we choke on circuit breakers. We try to reinvent our language in digital code, the way others are reinventing it through their cultural experiences.

_first, we loose capitals, because we loose the ability to understand emphasis. our language becomes less subtle and we become less interested in nuance. instead, we replace it with sensationalism. we would not care for a girl curled onto a floor crying unless she was naked or bloody. without sex and violence, without the adjectives and adverbs to convey the deepest of sins, a story becomes an outline.

_next we loose punctuation because our minds have become accustomed to the way that we talk the way that we think we can separate the lines of text ourselves we dont need to see a comma to think a comma her story looses the ability to curl into itself it becomes a snake that eats its own tail a tale that we keep telling ourselves over and over again

_nxt we abrviat bcuz tme is mny n with that spellin dsnt matter nemore

_nxt nmbrs replac leters 2 b mor fishent n we 4get her story al2gthr bcuz it was 2 werdy 2 4en

_bi reinvntng our lang 2 mak it c0de we looz da abili-t to tell stories lik hurs but we stil curl up on da flor cryen

- Kid