Sometimes, I think about all the people across the world learning English, and it makes me quietly sad. Billions of us, students, dreamers, wanderers, spend hour after hour repeating dialogues from dusty textbooks, practicing conversations with people who don’t exist.
Chris, Sally, Max, John. Peter, Tom, Angela. They live in the pages of a school book, in the exercises we memorize, in the imaginary classrooms where we stumble over pronunciation. We ask questions. We answer questions. We laugh, we apologize, we say “Nice to meet you.” And then we close the book.
And then we graduate. And we’ve never met a single one of them. Never heard a real accent, never shared a real laugh, never had a real conversation. All those hours of speaking into the void, building bridges that never existed.
Sometimes I wonder if Americans and maybe the English-speaking world at large, realize how vast this silent loneliness is. Not just learning a language, but performing life with imaginary friends, over and over, until we think we’re ready for the real world.
And yet, the world keeps turning, the textbooks keep being written, the dialogues keep being drilled, and we keep walking through life, fluent in a language that never spoke back to us.