I forgot Language.

Still, there it stands, against the decimated remains of a land ravaged by wildfire and warfare, on the site where we once lived as a young family, full of hope. It is all that remains alive.

I remember now.

We grew it from seeds we bought on eBay, back when eBay was still legal and the internet was open to all. ‘Seeds of language’, they were called, enticingly, but the scant product description offered no further clarification.

At the time we were teaching at the local university, before they closed down our department, then the whole university, then all the universities. 

We were both linguistics professors, so ‘Seeds of language’ intrigued us. We paid extra for expedited delivery.

‘Maybe they’ll grow into syntax trees,’ said my husband Jim, a generativist.

‘What does Noam Chomsky know about botany?’ I countered. ‘His trees grow upside down.’ I proposed instead a Saussurian species, which would wave coin-shaped signifier leaves, their signified undersides flashing suggestively in stormy breezes.

We sowed the seeds in pots in the greenhouse. We took a photo of the one that germinated and did a reverse image search to identify it.

‘Sapling,’ was all that Google could tell us. (This was when we still had Google). We named it ‘Language’ and planted it near the weeping willow behind our house. 

Soon after, we fled the country to protect our son Devon, whose gender made him an outlaw, just in time to squeeze through the nation’s tightening borders.

In the ensuing decades, I have forgotten many things. 

I am only now remembering Language.

A verdant desire sprouts from within my decomposing weariness: I want to dwell in the warm embrace of Language. I climb up to nestle in its welcoming limbs. 

Language envelops me. It roots me in its thrumming pulse. It evaporates the accumulated shame of my culture’s demise and the decimation of my own exhausted history.

‘Where have you been?’ Language wonders.

A bright new thought blossoms—that I’ve never, until now, inhabited Language—that it is only from within this sheltering space that self and culture will heal.

‘I have always been here for you,’ says Language, and tears form, flowing like sap.