When I was assigned this essay, I knew I had wanted to write about the vibrant linguistic culture I was witnessing both unfold and accelerate in my new city. Each day, I notice a variety of languages and subsets within them being used to communicate, sometimes completely on their own and oftentimes in accompaniment to one another. The linguistic intelligence within these spaces opened my mind to just how integral language is to a community, and how beautifully non-standard many English speakers around me incorporated the language into their dialogue. On benches, at delis, and on my way to class, I notice a new, welcoming vibrance in every diverse communication I get to share in. 

As plentiful as these moments were, I did not feel that any singular flash interaction would create a 625-750 word narrative essay. One interaction would be a notes app page with a hell of a lot of introspection, accidentally more about my own findings than the folks that introduced them to me to begin with, Many interactions would be a chapter of a book and, perhaps, their lessons will be someday. After I spoke with Elena, though, I knew I had encountered a slightly rare experience with a slightly common story attached to it. That is what inspires my work the most.

The piece’s narrative genre, almost begging for a writer’s utmost introspection while still holding space for their objective story, allowed me to reflect on the communication in terms of my own findings. I felt so fortunate to have aided Elena in her English-speaking journey, but I truly felt that there was a more give-and-take relationship within our interaction and the power of community she exposed me to. Thus, I explored the commonality and mutuality of linguistic discoveries. More specifically, I found that I was still learning from our shared language in a different way than she was. Since Elena came during a vulnerable time in my journey of self-discovery, right when I moved to a new city,  I reflected upon why that sense of community had been so important to me. I came to understand the essentialness of the quieter language each human thinks in and speaks inwardly, the compass in our heads that is still not quite sure how to navigate us. The awareness that many learn to navigate this language outwardly, almost on the same page, was a comfort to me. 

As a writer pushed through the American academic machine for most of my life, I get used to writing in a fancy, pretty “standard” English. It scored me high in my English classes growing up and, since sophisticated language seemed proper in an academic, introspective English piece, it seemed like the natural trajectory of my first draft. When I met with my first college academic advisor to review it, though, I was told to revise essentially all of what I had been applauded for in my work up until that point. 

As difficult as the habit was to break, it taught me the balance of writing with my learned voice as well as making the piece digestible for my intended audiences. Since I spoke to both language-speakers and language-learners from all ends of the fluency spectrum, this oftentimes meant extracting the complextively-worded, extensive, Dickens-style metaphors or keeping my large vocabulary-riddled sentences shorter. I could, we agreed, keep in the less complexively-worded metaphors and use the obnoxious vocabulary I learned from other writers whose introspective pieces I’ve admired. 

 I finished the drafting process with a piece that appealed to both my own learned voice and that of diverse readers. This taught me, just as I had discovered in verbal and inward language, that there exists an immense power in mutual understanding within  writing. I hope to let this lesson accompany my writing moving forward  to inspire my city the way it has inspired me.  

Born in America to English-speaking parents, my linguistic journey began with my verbal establishment of the language. I could verbalize it to my peers or, eventually, myself in an inward way. Thus, my language became my connection to the greater noises surrounding me in smalltown South Jersey. Moving to New York, however, would challenge the tongues with which that inner standpoint spoke. My verbal English sufficed, but my inner language might as well have been white noise. Could the ripe, reckless English of my inner compass guide me through the city’s smoother natives, having established compasses of their own? My first night in the city taught me that the English of both mouth and mind are equally valuable. 

The ancient concrete staircases of St. Nicholas Park are beige and fine at a glance, but bronze, muddy, and rather rotten if seated. Nights by these soiled stairs become special, almost begging passerbys to sit. Even in the darkness, this space was wildly unlike the shoebox of home, its nights obnoxiously bright with few frolickers. On these stairs, I could know folks by their dark silhouettes as they danced with one another, and many from tricks of their tongues that never bit back stories I so desperately wanted us to hear. 

I knew I was in a place to hear them, too. Harlem is an invaluable haven of the city and has been home to plentiful communicative revolutions, from music in the Harlem Renaissance to Malcolm X’s pleas and progressions. I knew that the neighborhood held many diverse perspectives since the influence of the two, and that folks in Harlem still share in their influence even today to connect their identities with those being some of the first to. Folks from diverse cultural backgrounds have yearned for a place to be heard, in an even more self-affirming way than I had been. Harlem gave it to them. 

Elena, too, did so for me. 

I had never spoken to Elena, though underneath straying strawberry blonde curls, she approached with this giddy, inoperable laugh as if I had. I wondered why she revisited my second step from her debrisless, leafless third. It almost made me laugh louder and more definitively than her. I was confused by her approach, but I was not going to discredit it. I felt that I had charm to offer the city at last. 

Since the stillness of the suburbs, I had felt small and motionless. My street clothes had worn themselves out from the city’s hustle, green cargo pants fading olive and little approachability in a wrinkled black tank. I was not the cooler passerby I was attempting to be twenty minutes prior, lighting that wrinkled, stubby Marlboro from my pocket. Why was I suddenly approachable to her? Her knitted cardigan was a brighter green, and she walked with a brighter bounce and this refusal to step backwards. I felt differently about the way I carried myself. 

Elena could not have smelled the burnt ash of my palms, but she must have known the metallic taste I had been trying to swallow and savor with a dry, then silent tongue. She crouched down, eye-level.  

“Do you have a cigarette?” she said as she tilted her head and squinted with blank, black eyes.  Her smile was toothy and cartoonish, like dull fangs with curious, harmless intent.  

I humored her. Though she likely intended a mere question, I heard language. I wanted her to hear the same.    

“Will you need a lighter,” I offered in this antithetically innocent tone.

 She squinted again. 

 This time, she echoed Harlem’s finest favorite phrase, “a lighter,” before sitting on the white-spotted, bird-burdened step below us.  

“I’m practicing my English. This is a lighter?” 

It would become clear to me that while I was establishing my inner language, she was establishing the one I had been speaking all along. To myself, I might not have been able to offer the fresh street smarts of the passerbys. To this passerby, though, perhaps I could offer the rhythm of language with which I was familiar. 

I felt connected to this stranger, as oddly familiar as she then was. We were now speaking in works of progress, this beautiful, valuable common tongue that would continue to allow us spoilages to share. Thus, we exchanged stories of her neighborhood far downtown, in Chelsea.

“Pier? That’s what it’s called,” she inquired upon my description of the palmy and boardwalk-based Little Island that was, indeed, one. I nodded.

 “Pier,” she repeated with that giddy, inoperable tone from before. “Pier.” 

Though we came from opposite ends of the stairs, we bonded over our ability to meet each other precisely where we were at. We both craved communication and were able to mutually deliver it through our respective tongues. 

That night continues to remind me of the value of language in the city with so much diversity to offer within it. Harlem is distinctively special because Harlem is culturally connective, its diverse passerbys offering the neighborhood constant learning experiences and new linguistic perspectives to value. Elena and I assumed both the roles of teachers and learners within one another’s journeys, our many Englishes passively promising that no new learner of a language is alone within it. Approaching my three months since beginning college in the city, my experience with Elena reminds me that this makes language the most powerful connector. Harlem will be my most valuable learning experience as I navigate the many nuances of young adulthood.