Fourteen years of frustration with the world had taken me to a point of almost perfection, and then I stopped trying.
Every negative experience had been channelled into a particular aim; not the screwing-up and throwing away of thoughts and emotions, but the careful rolling-up and pushing through the machinery of the mind in order that it re-emerges transformed but still recognisable.
At 14, I spoke French better than anyone my age, and I had convinced myself that my future was a secure one: I would be an interpreter, and was prepared to splinter the bones of anything which dared to get in the way.
The formative years of squinting through the patch which covered my bastard, difficult left eye; the ache of having to explain to people who should have known better; the disconnection which had no regard for age (I recoiled from strangers both old and young) had been leading up to the moment when I would conquer, inevitably, the French language.
The paradox of complete confidence and disabling ineptitude which I demonstrated then is something which persists to this day. I could demand of a teacher whom I'd met twice in my life that he take more notice of me when I put my hand up in his class to answer questions, and yet preferred the pretence of dispensing cups of tea from a brick wall instead of addressing someone the same age as I. I mastered the pluperfect tense in a foreign language, but could not express feelings for particular females in my first one.
I was very nearly perfect, writing little stories in French for the (male) teacher whom I obsessed over, and retreating into the soft, easy world of concepts which I grasped without even having to think. Yet everything else turned to shit - I could no more understand equations, or play rugby, or feign an interest in geography, than I could speak to a stranger.
Now, at the age of 30, I am starting again. I've had to track back across the last decade-and-a-half of existence, to pull out the language-capable, shy teenager as I attempt to re-learn not French, but Spanish. The old feeling of unsheathed, raw excitement that would take me over whenever I opened a textbook is still there; no longer to the extent that I can sense my heart rising through my mouth like a helium balloon, but it is nevertheless there.
The confidence, the sense of inferiority, the ambition, the silence, the nerves. I am slowly becoming 14 again.
