The blessing of tongues

Three voices bounce off each other, resonating up the stairwell. Two guys and a woman are speaking in Japanese, balancing lunch trays and exchanging jokes on their way to or from the break room. Languages surround you: as you blow on your microwaved soup, as you wait for the bus, as you move your whites from the washer to the dryer. The many tongues remind you that you don't know everything, that other ways exist. That speech is a musical and percussive tool of consciousness, rather than consciousness itself. That the stilted English you hear on the phone is the echo of a deep, full mind, its richness filtered through the coarse sieve of translation. You live in a world of six point seven billion teasing, griping, flirting, exulting aliens, of whom you are one, with whom you are kin.

Greetings earthlings.

That's what the training program says we usually say. Or just come in and start blowing stuff up. Makes me titter. Why would you go someplace just to destroy it, not even sightsee first? I guess that's something homo sapiens sapiens do, though. Take me to your leader, that's next. No, really I want to try out this water stuff. And I want to hear the noises of flies, and eat kelp straight from the sea. And sleep! I'm a little afraid of that, but the manuals say it only lasts a little while, and doesn't hurt. Actually maybe it would be better if I slept a very long time. It might help me learn to forget. I'm not supposed to try these things, but I've thought it through. I'll stay hazy during, so nobody here will notice, and then I can pretend I got lost on the way back, to account for gaps in my eras. Heaven knows Rrina and her moons won't miss me. Maybe this will make her regret blowing gases at me when she told me never to return.