Misunderstandings are simply a consequence of attempting to use words to convey life.
To Whom it May Concern:
In the event that this quiet endeavor of mine is successful and that someone (you) finds this letter and subsequently reads it, please note that today is not a sad one, but a happy one.
I am not the desperate egotist that is frequently associated with this type of action, but a quiet if not thoughtful man who has lived a life and come to a moment of contentment that today was the obvious conclusion to.
Let me say here that though it is addressed to the finder of my secret, this is my letter and it will be my last. I suspect that when I am found, when my apartment door is cracked sheepishly by my curious landlady and the light stares in squares from the barred window in the hall, as it often does, that my body and the act it implies will be considered the small tragedy of a pathetic man.
Perhaps the media will light a small torch in honor of humanity’s joylessness and run a headline like Teaching Breeds Self-Hatred. The article would probably hold quotes from some fame-hungry colleague looking appropriately bewildered, the painstakingly rehearsed lines tearing a crease through her forehead. Other ESL teachers would whimper sympathetic clichés like, “He was such a nice guy,” or perhaps more appropriately, “I don’t recall his face…are you sure he worked here?” This sounds like bitterness, dear reader, but let me be clear that I do not hold hatred for you for living as I die, for there is nothing more that I desire.
Of course this feat of mine will be misunderstood, as it always is; there will be blame placed and unasked questions answered. You may read this letter and think my reasons completely random. But misunderstandings are simply a consequence of attempting to use words to convey life. I know now, after all my years of teaching words and the meanings they associate with, that words are never equal to the concepts they explain, that words and their concepts actually coexist in infinite worlds of their own.
I have a theory that the men who wrote the first English dictionary invented homonyms as joke on non-native speakers. It’s like when you go to Newfoundland for the first time and all the Newfies gather around and cheer you on while you kiss a dead trout and drink a shot of Screech. It’s the reason there are so many Newfie jokes. The Newfies can always say, “Well at least I didn’t pucker my lips for a dead trout and drink the piss out of every barrel of Jamaican rum.”
When I was let in on this type of hoopla (a word that as of yet has not been grasped by my students) I did notice the peculiar glint of curiosity in the locals’ eyes, but nudged it off, believing it to be the fault of my overly suspicious nature. Later I realized that nobody from Newfoundland ever drank Screech. On the back of the bottle it states that the “rum” was made in Jamaica but bottled in Newfoundland. And the dead trout? Well, that’s just a joke on tradition in general, I guess. What kind of idiot names a province Newfoundland anyways?
I know I’m letting myself sidetrack here. It’s a habit that teachers who think of themselves as shy but truly adore audiences tend to acquire. I was telling you about homonyms.
Last week I went to one of my student’s apartment for lunch break. It was unprecedented and I’m pretty sure against school policy. But he insisted, and he’s a good kid, so I went. His bachelor suite was small and unfurnished and I found myself liking him more because of it. He is a simple person but not in the way that people usually say it. He likes complicated things and he likes to make them simple. For example, I once caught him reading an Oxford English Dictionary in the park on a Sunday. When I told him that reading an English dictionary was, no doubt, the worst possible way to learn the language, he just shrugged.
I tried to glance casually at the paper he was jotting down words on, but he folded it up and told me it was idiotic (a word I had taught him that he seemed to have taken a liking to). When I finally convinced him to let me see it I regretted the impulse. His side project was to locate colloquial English words with proper English definitions and reverse the structure. He had changed “Slut. n. A dirty, slovenly woman,” to “Promiscuous. adj. A chick who gets around.” Then I felt like the idiot. As a teacher you’re supposed to care more for your subject than your pupil. It’s part of the structure. It was a ridiculous, mind-wasting thing to do, but he had dedicated his whole Sunday to it, while I was attempting not to think at all.
In his L-shaped apartment, empty but for a desk and chair, a bookshelf and a bed, he fed me plain pasta in a bowl and French toast on a plate. When I made the obligatory teacher comment about not allowing Western food to lead him away from proper nutrition, he insisted that Canada had wonderful food and so much of it that he felt he could eat poorly for a month and make a complete turnaround in health the next.
I finished the French toast in silence. I liked his reasoning. I liked how sure he was of the world. It had been a long time since I considered that a turnaround in my life was possible.
My head felt so blank, sitting on a couple of milk crates at the counter in his dull white apartment. But he didn’t. He seemed to fill the small room with energy and anticipation. His glistening eyes said that they wanted something but that the wait would be worth it.
Despite the fact that I am lactose intolerant, my student convinced me to have a large glass of milk with the seemingly sound reasoning that he enjoyed the appearance of one colour meals: white pasta, beige toast and white milk. When he opened the milk carton he stared at it for a long time with no visible reaction. Then he just said, “the milk is aspired.” The teacher in me clicked on. “What?” I asked rudely. “The milk is dead. It has curdled, you see?” He said, and pushed the carton across the counter towards me. The implied meaning of the sentences together hit me and I couldn’t correct him because I agreed. The milk aspired to be dead. Who am I to insist that he is incorrect?
Later that night, after shutting our conversation out of my mind to replace it with teaching colloquial phrases, I found that it continued to haunt me. The milk aspires to be dead. It was so simple. Milk is going bad from the moment it is produced. Its only goal is death. If milk had a mind, it would constantly be thinking, “I aspire to be dead,” until it was. The next day I opened my class participation folder and found that I had unconsciously written the statement at the top of the page. “I aspire to be dead,” it read. “Yes,” I said, “Yes.”
When I think of that lunch today the same excitement rises, the pores on my fingertips open and the static edges of my mind seem to smooth over. You may find it strange that a student’s personification of a carton of milk would change a person’s life to such a degree, but in the end it all comes down to the smallest time fragments and all the big moments become completely arbitrary. Most lives are lived as foggy re-enactment of familiar plotlines with forced dénouements and planned twists. There is no flow and even poorer conviction. But through the great swinging doors of life and death I found my ending and I can say with assurance that I know how I will die.
