All the Things I Have Swallowed, and Everything I Have Written

The language of a quiet girl

TAVI CHHAY

Today, I have written more words than I have spoken. I have not spoken to a single soul. You think that because I don’t speak, nothing goes on inside my head—that I don’t have any thoughts or feelings. Maybe I just don’t want to talk to you, to someone who doesn’t actually care about what comes out of my mouth, to someone who doesn’t actually hear me. I hate the way men talk just to hear themselves, how they gravitate toward me because I’m quiet and I listen. I don’t want to listen to your unoriginal, milquetoast takes. It took getting high for you to realize things I understood when I was 13. Men are so comfortable taking up space. They’ll interrupt class just to say the most inconsequential, uninspired thing, seemingly unable to tolerate a moment in which they aren’t being heard.

I’ve never had a loud voice. Growing up, teachers would yell at me, telling me to speak up, as if I was committing a sin. You think that because I speak softly, it gives you the right to be condescending toward me. It means you can place the boy with behavioral problems next to me so you don’t have to deal with him yourself. It means everyone is allowed to pour their frustrations onto me, to take their emotions out on me. I’m expected to regulate everyone else’s emotions simply because I don’t outwardly express my own. Because I don’t vehemently express how I feel, you assume there is nothing to manage, nothing to consider, nothing that could possibly hurt me. You don’t know me. You think you know everything about me, that I’m nothing more than a quiet mouse.

Words affect me too much. They stay with me for a long time. I think about every interaction I’ve ever had, replaying the conversations in my head, analyzing every little detail. I revisit these moments over and over, searching for meanings that may not even be there. I think about what I could’ve said if I were brave enough, how badly I wanted to let out the firefly rage inside of me, burning everything down instead of swallowing it. But my mother raised a polite young lady.

I think the biggest pain in life has been the language barrier between me and my parents. I express so much of myself through words, yet so much of what I want to say remains beyond their reach. They don’t know me, not really—not beyond the few words I can manage to put together in Khmer. I can only express so much through the handful of words I still know. With the little English my parents know, they try their best to piece together my broken Khmer. There was always so much pressure surrounding how well I would keep up with my peers growing up, when I didn’t speak English at home. As I learned more and more English, I gradually forgot more and more Khmer. I eventually excelled in English and literature throughout school, and my teachers often complimented me on my writing. But my parents could never understand the words I was so often praised for putting on paper. They miss out on knowing a lot about me, but I just wish they knew how much of what I write is about them. How often I think about them even when I struggle to find the words to say to them.

Sometimes, I am so overwhelmed with emotion that I can’t speak. Words spoken aloud in that moment could never do justice to what I’m feeling. The only thing I can do is write. I’m better at writing than I am at speaking. I write so much about how I feel that I’ve almost forgotten how to articulate those words out loud. I want to truly be heard, not simply be listened to. There is something so much more intimate about reading words on a page than hearing the jumble of words that come out of someone’s mouth. Most of the time, we’re only half-listening, waiting for our turn to speak, never fully absorbing what the other person is saying. But when you read something, it feels more permanent. It’s deliberate. The words are there, in front of you, asking to be considered. You can sit with them, return to them, reread them, and find something new in them each time. There is a kind of intimacy in knowing that someone took the time to put their thoughts into words, and that you, in turn, are taking the time to understand them.