ragazza, now i know

i'm learning italian. i finally gave in and downloaded duolingo - i really don't know what took me so long. i chose italian and arabic, but italian is easier and i'm not the best at commiting so i'll learn arabic someday. honestly i only chose arabic because i wanted to understand the news about the war when they show up in their original language. but the truth is, it's too painful to watch so i'm not ready to really understand how they put it into words. every time i try to talk about the war, i end up repeating what i've heard others say. i never seem to be able to find in my vocabulary the right words. so i decided to learn another language because i want to be able to know more words so when i can't find them in my mother tongue or the tongue of my colonizer -which is the only one i can use on this platform- i might find them elsewhere. and like i said, i chose italian because it was easier than arabic. i'm now in the 3rd unit and learning about adjectives and how to order in a restaurant. it's funny how they make these games for people to learn. most lessons i feel stupid and like i'm wasting my time. on duo lingo's defense, italian feels close to spanish so it really isn't their fault that i get bored. but on this lesson, i learned a new word. and it wasn't really new. i just didn't know what it meant. and it triggered a memory. i remembered this person, it's been such a long time since i last thought of her. for a second i forgot her name. then i remembered. and i remembered she was learning italian when we first met and she liked to use italian adjectives on me. it's funny now that i think about it, how powerful it really is to know a different language and to be able to keep little secrets from people right in their faces. it's sad that we aren't taught more languages in school, among other useful skills that would actually help us relate as a species. we focused on planting so many flags and building so many walls, we forgot we all belong to the same ground. i try to understand, really, people's ambition and thirst for power. the more i think about it, the less sense it all makes. i feel like i can't justify the things people do, how we invented rights to then break them and the fact there's an actual organization that claims to exist to protect those rights yet they vote behind closed doors wether to stop or not a genocide -as if it was questionable. one would think that after all this time, everything that has been discovered and able to prove, everything that has been written and turned into a movie, one would think after three thousand years, the world could be different, but now. feels like we're all stuck in the tower of babel, not being able to understand each other, looking for every opportunity to step over someone else's existence. it's like this tiktok i saw about some girl, a sweden human rights activist who went to gaza to aid the victims and was retained by the israeli army and taken in custody and they were trying to force her to sign some papers but everything was in hebrew... languages really are a powerful thing, knowing more than one can really make a difference - i feel like without thinking about it, i just made a pretty good ad for duolingo.