Awakening.

I grew up with words in my mouth; vocabulary and syntax blessed me early and I read fluently before I turned three. In my memory there is no time before, no conscious obscurity, no figuring things out, no working toward a goal. For me literacy just was, and so too was grammar and spelling. In kindergarten I sighed and lay down in frustration during Reading Circle time; the kind German woman in charge gave me a blank notebook and as other kids tripped over 'fought' and 'caught' I got to write stories. My first grade teacher was so amused by my six-year-old editorial rigidity that she put me in the high school spelling bee, where I competed against teenagers and held my own. And grammar! Grammar was not and never has been an issue of thought; for me it is instinct. I can feel grammar; from some deep and incomprehensible place I know why certain words go certain ways. I've always known, and not because I worked to gain that knowledge. It's because it is already there.

I was incurably unilingual until my second year of college; a stint in high school Spanish taught me nothing but "queso" and "pantalones" and I walked into my first Arabic class scared out of my mind. Over the past two years I've acquired structure, syntax, phonology, vocabulary, and the exciting beginnings of style. But more than anything else in Arabic, my favorite thing to learn is grammar. Because inexplicably--impossibly!--Arabic grammar is in me, too. It's there, and it lives in the same inscrutable soul-place where all the rules of English make their home. I'm beginning to feel case markings, relative clauses, volitional moods, relator pronouns, and intranslatable particles, and it doesn't feel like learning. It feels like awakening. I'm learning that true grammar is deeper than English; grammar is a mystic sense, a universal truth, nonspecific and yet masochistically so, the underlying thread on which every word in every language is strung together and lifted up into carefully shaped eloquence.