How To Say Goodbye In Three Different Languages

you make me stutter in every language I have It is a cold night in a foreign country and I want to go outside in the black of rural Germany and speak to the river, to say hello to the ducks that are not called ducks and the water that is not called water, to lay myself down on the pebbles that are not called pebbles and watch the stars that are always the same, until they aren't. I am awkward and foreign and nothing like what you grew up with, and I am not like the shining girls in the movies and nothing like you expected, and it hurts your ears to hear my stumbling German, and you keep writing back my German gets better the nights get colder as the shadow of the Alps gets longer the snow thrown off like a wedding veil from these peaks. they speak thickly down here, you speak thickly, you know it is German that is not German, and they laugh because from the Zugspitze, you can see the edges of the world. this was beautiful to visit, and it would hurt too much to stay with a kiss that is not a kiss and a smile that I confuse with laugh Goodbye. Auf Wiedersehen. Und nie werden wir einander wieder sehen. And we will never see each other again.