A lifetime ago, we were out late with four close friends. We’d been - as was our habit - drinking too much and eating too little. For whatever reason - insufficient funds probably - we together called it a night and started to head to our separate homes. We were walking towards the overpass that would allow us to cross the normally busy road when Y decided that he didn’t want to deal with the hassle of stairs and would rather, instead, hop the railing separating the sidewalk from the street and, thus, be able to more efficiently get from where we were to where we were going. One of us yelled at him not to be fucking dumb and jump into oncoming traffic, but to no avail. He ran unstably away, clumsily hurdled the railing, and fell directly onto his head.
There were, thankfully, no cars just then passing by to add injury to injury, so, after the initial shock of Y’s idiocy, two of us ran over, climbed over the railing, pulled Y to his feet, and shepherded him back onto the sidewalk. He seemed a little stunned. He wasn’t making much noise or really doing anything other than blinking a lot. We checked his head to see if it was bleeding. It didn’t seem to be, but he was pretty sweaty and it was gross to be pawing around his head searching for wounds and he kept swatting us away. We sat him down on the sidewalk and told him to stay there.
We were divided on how to tend to Y in this moment. A couple of us were trying to see if he was OK while a couple of us were trying to scold him. We eventually turned our attention away from Y himself and towards each other. We argued over whether going to a hospital would be overkill. We’d - being minors all - get in unquestionable shit for Y’s injury, for waking parents, for any of all the things we’d been up to that weekday evening. But also we didn’t want our friend to, y’know, die? So, we debated the merits poorly - none of us giving ground or really actually listening to anyone else - and eventually resolved to consult Y who, despite having a bit of a hard time sitting up straight, was conscious and seemingly lucid. He’d been sitting in silence, trying to smoke a cigarette and tipping over occasionally into the bushes, while we argued. Y would have to tell us whether he wanted or needed to go to the hospital and that would be that. So, we asked Y what he wanted to do.
And he answered us in Portuguese.
This was a surprise. Mostly because Y did not speak Portuguese. Y didn’t speak any language other than English as far as we knew. The insanity of this situation wasn’t lost on us, but it wasn’t then the time to dwell on how or why our friend had lost his English. His evident brain damage was a more pressing concern.
One of our friends - born/raised in Brazil and fluent in Portuguese - told us that Y was imperfectly expressing his desire to just go home. Not only could Y speak Portuguese, but he understood it. Our Brazilian friend had a heated exchange with Y while the rest of us, lacking even a modicum of Portuguese, stood still and uncomprehending in the surreality of the situation.
Y didn’t want to go to the hospital. He really didn’t. As far as we were concerned, Y’s particular wants were no longer relevant. He had fallen and knocked his sole and primary language out of his brain. A hospital was the only choice. Doctors were necessary. Y, though, was adamant (in Portuguese) that he would not go to the hospital. He was arguing, fiercely, for his autonomy. Our Brazilian friend translated for us. Y was making, he explained, a strong case that he was just drunk and tired and a good night’s sleep would be the best thing for him now. Y’s argument was, apparently, so persuasive that our Brazilian friend was starting to waver in his commitment to our hospital plan. We tried to emphasize that it was probably very important that Y could no longer express himself in English. It was likely a bad sign for his brain that he was suddenly unilingual in an altogether unexpected way. We all argued - Y was very upset (we were told) that no one was taking his wishes seriously - and squeezed together into a cab.
We took Y home in the end and, upon arrival, woke his parents and explained the situation as best as we could. They asked him how he was feeling and, again, he responded in Portuguese. This prompted his father - without a word or skipping a beat - to grab his car keys and cart his son off to the hospital as quickly as possible with our Brazilian friend in tow for translation purposes. His parents, like us, had absolutely no idea how to process their son’s sudden loss of English and acquisition of Portuguese.
With this bizarre crisis out of our hands, the three of us went back to our places and - on the way - wondered what the actual fuck we’d just witnessed. Was this a medical marvel? Would Y’s accidental head injury lead researchers to discover a specifically Portuguese part of the brain? Is there, hidden within each of us, a secret linguistic faculty that is only unlocked by blunt force trauma? Would we be better equipped to pass Spanish or Mandarin or whatever if we hucked ourselves headward at the ground? What other mysterious capabilities were being hosted latently in our minds? Would a baseball bat swung at the skull somehow knock out other appreciable skills? Not knowing how to understand what had just happened, we asked each other questions we couldn’t answer and eventually went our separate ways and collapsed into bed and worried and wondered about Y.
Our worrying and wondering wasn’t only about Y’s physical well-being, but more broadly about Y himself and - as we continued to think - everyone else. Not only did we not know that Portuguese was something Y somehow knew, but we didn’t know that Portuguese was something Y could have possibly come to know. There was this whole apparently secret part of him that, by accident, had been revealed to us. Of course, it didn’t really matter in any significant way that he spoke another language. Good for him. But why did he learn it? And how? And why wasn’t this something he shared? What was he doing it for? We had no way of navigating these questions; they just hung there. What else did Y do or know or care about that he kept to himself? Moreover, how much else was there in Y’s head or the heads of others that was so far beyond our ken that we’d be stunned quiet to learn?
We ran through all of the other things we could have not known about our close friend, all of the other things that we’d fail to understand if they came out randomly at some point. We considered all the people we considered close and what veiled desires, abilities, or activities existed behind their eyes. It was not, then, news to us that we knew nothing - but the surprisingly random and wholly unexpected character of Y’s Portuguese had us spun. No one shared everything and we couldn’t know everything, but how vast was the field of our ignorance, how unexpected were the interior lives of the others we loved? And, most importantly, did it matter? Did it matter that there was so much we definitely didn’t know about people we would say we knew very well?
These questions eventually wound down. Of course, whether we knew Y in as full a sense as we had once believed didn’t really matter. We cared about Y, secret Portuguese and all. Our care wasn’t (it seems) predicated on the quality or quantity of knowledge we had about him. Our new knowledge of him eventually just fit in with our established feelings for him. It seemed, then, strange that it was easy enough to simply shrug at a new fact like that. So the questions started up again. Would we feel similarly if we’d learned - by surprise due to some other injury - that his name was something other than Y, that he was secretly very good at knitting, that he had memorized many poems, that he hated people who wore hats? At what point would we have to admit that we didn’t really know our friend and, in admitting that, accept that maybe he wasn’t really our friend at all? Or, maybe, was the first part not at all - even a little - connected to the other?
How much if anything did we need or have to know about other people to care about them? And of those we cared about already, how much did our knowledge of them affect that care?
There is only so long that one can ask oneself questions like this and, at some point surely, we fell asleep.
Our Brazilian friend had, by the time we woke up the next morning, messaged each of us to say that Y had suffered a concussion and needed a few stitches. He was, all told, fine. He’d sobered up. He started speaking English again at some point. This was a relief, obviously, but it wasn’t satisfying. It didn’t explain anything. Why and how did Y speak Portuguese seemingly out of nowhere? While we’d resolved not to worry too much about how little we knew about or understood the minds of our friends, we still very much wanted to know and understand what was going on with and in them. It felt like it was important to know. Our friends felt similarly.
It is tricky, far trickier than we understood as a teen, to know others while respecting the fact that they’ll stay - whether they want to or not - ultimately unknowable. Even while respecting a person’s desire to keep things to themselves, it is hard (still) to quell that drive to know everything about those with whom you are or want to be close. It is always so easy to mistakenly believe that knowledge determines feeling, that ignorance has some bearing on love. It’s easy because, of course, it is far simpler to gain knowledge and lose ignorance than it is to allow oneself to feel what one feels without explicit reason and love who one loves fully without explanation.
Anyways - we all learned, after Y was back at school later that week, that he’d been diligently learning Portuguese for months. Why was he learning Portuguese? Because, he admitted, he was down impossibly bad for C, our Brazilian friend’s younger sister. Was it necessary to learn Portuguese before he acted on this crush? Absolutely not. Had he somehow gotten it into his head that his ability to speak with C in Portuguese, to communicate with her in a language reserved mostly for her family and old friends, would increase the likelihood that she would reciprocate his feelings? Somehow yes. We were, over the course of this conversation, finding out all sorts of until then unknown stuff about our friend: his feelings for C, how he was preparing to act on those feelings, and the fact that some sentimental romance movie logic was underlying both. We mostly mocked him and he forced us to promise not to say anything to her about any of this and we didn’t.
Y eventually asked C out. They dated for a little while and broke up undramatically.
We asked C, months later, whether Y ever spoke Portuguese with her. She said that, one night out of nowhere, he did. She found it deeply embarrassing and asked him to stop immediately. We asked why and she didn’t know. We asked what he said and she couldn’t remember. She said she really cared about Y - but not like that, y’know? And of course we didn’t know and couldn’t know, but felt close enough to them both that we somehow understood what she was saying without understanding really anything at all. And when Y said something similar later about how things just didn’t work out for whatever reason and that he was sad about it but not really all that sad about it, y’know? We just mostly nodded and sat there and felt like we knew what he meant and then asked him what new language he was acquiring for some idle crush and he told us to shut the fuck up and laughed and called us what we felt was probably a very derogatory term in Portuguese but then again we don’t understand a lick of Portugueuse so maybe instead it was a term of endearment. We really didn’t know, but that didn’t really matter. Y’know?
"How much if anything did we need or have to know about other people to care about them? And of those we cared about already, how much did our knowledge of them affect that care?"
DUDE. BRO. FUCK.
Your writing style is so satisfying! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this☻