Seven Spanish verbs to make your future-wife cry with

published: 2022-02-27

extrañar (to miss)

There's a woman that I love, that I miss very much whenever she's not around. Spanish is her first language, although we've never had a chance to attempt an actual conversation in it. Written language in my dreams feels like I've developed her dyslexia as the letters dance around on the page and shift into other words and sentences and never stay still. And I was never very good at speaking in any language other than my own, and even then, unpolished artifacts from my elementary school years spent in speech therapy still remain. And she's fluent enough anyways, so until the time comes for me to leave this world and finally settle down with her in Sablade forever, we're stuck with talking and maybe tracing words on each other's skin.

Extrañar is, to my surprise, related to the adjective extraño, meaning "strange". This doesn't mean my love is strange or unusual- for fuck's sake, don't call me "queer"- but that both are ultimately derived from the Latin term extra, meaning "foreign" or "outside". And if I miss someone, they're certainly outside of where I want them to be... which is usually somewhere in my presence, if not at my side.

Una breve visión de un patio en un campus universitario. Está nevando. Los cielos están cubiertos. Hay una estatua rodeada de flores que florecen en el invierno.

Hay una mujer de cabello oscuro cerca de la estatua. Le duele la garganta, como las flores están creciendo allí también. Ella teme, si ella llora, las lágrimas se congelarán en sus ojos.

"...Te extraño."

ocuparse (to take care of)

Ocupar comes from the Latin terms ob, meaning "toward, and capere, "to capture". Ocupar as a verb has many other meanings other than "to take care of" which involve occupying something, including "to take up space", "to spend time", "to take a seat", and "to fill a vacancy". If one puts a pre in front of ocuparse, it becomes "to worry about", as if one's mind had been... occupied by invasive thoughts. Funny how language works!

Approximately once a month, my college puts on a Grocery Bingo. There are twenty numbered bags (which I help organize college-bought groceries into as part of my job), and the first twenty people to get bingos win a bag. Each student can only win once per month. There used to be a rule where students who had won could keep playing to potentially win a bag for one of their friends, but the rule got nuked after last month where a group of approximately thirty nursing students who all looked like literal clones of each other swarmed the place with multiple devices per student and took all the bags for themselves. I am also trying to convince my supervisor to move the Grocery Bingo days to Thursdays instead of Wednesdays because Wednesdays are when the nursing students descend on the campus commons like a swarm of locusts and Thursdays campus is usually near-empty... wish me luck?

Mis números de angeles son once y catorce. A veces también uno y cuatro. Son de la fiesta del Dia de los Callejones Sin Salidas que se encuentra el catorce de noviembre.

Estoy jugando bingo. Todos estan ganando excepto por yo. Son las once y cuarenta y uno de la mañana cuando yo oigo, "No te preocupes. Yo me ocuparé de ti." Pienso en mi prometida. Entonces finalmente gano.

desvivirse (to go out of your way for something)

Vivir comes from the Latin vivere, meaning "id". Not as in "identity", but the Freudian id, the unconscious part of the psyche that serves as the "source of psychic energy derived from instinctual needs and drives". When des is added to the beginning of a Spanish verb, it generally makes it its opposite. Therefore, one would think desvivirse (the se means it's being done to something) would mean "to kill"... but that's matar.

El gas tóxico se está filtrando en mi casa. Es pesado y oscuro como una enorme nube de humo. Tengo miedo de que nadie pueda limpiarlo y nunca podré regresar a mi casa, así que tomo una mochila y una maleta y pongo todas mis cosas favoritas.

Vamos a la casa de mi abuela. No hay otro lugar para ir. Recuerdo en la camioneta que olvidé algunos libros. Empiezo a llorar cuando mi novia me llama. Ella dice que ella se desvivirá por salvarlos de la casa. Cuando llegamos, los libros se apilan en la cama en la Habitación Púrpura. Y mi novia está allí, feliz que estoy a salvo.

buscar (to search for)

I've done my best to search for an etymology for buscar, but so far it's eluded me.

When I was in high school and bored beyond my mind on the computer, I would open random files in a hex editor just to see what was inside. As expected, most of them were just garbage, long columns full of unprintable characters. Occasionally, when I opened an old-school game ROM, I'd see what appeared to be a pixel art of some sort, or a repeating-enough-to-not-be-a-coincidence but otherwise incomprehensible block of symbols, or random snippets of ASCII strings. One game in particular, I discovered, had the full map data uncompressed, which meant I could, after having written a quick guide of which hex values meant which block types, edit the levels to get rid of annoying detours and dead ends and hard-to-parkour areas.

Why did I do it? To this day, I'm still not sure. Maybe I was hoping there would be some hidden message from the past in one of the files, a symbol of hope or dread. Maybe I was expecting, if I stared into the mess of hex values for long enough, to see the face of some impersonal god staring back. What was I searching for? What did I hope to find?

Estoy sentado en mi cama en mi habitación. Tengo una computadora portátil. El monitor está lleno de colores giratorios como un sueño psicodélico.

En el interior, veo la cara de la mujer que amo. Ella se extiende los brazos. Sus manos están buscando a las mías. Entonces empiezo a despertarme. Frenética, sus manos finalmente encuentran a las mías. Nuestros ojos se reúnen. Las agarra mis muñecas con fuerza, tratando de hacerme quedarse con ella el mayor tiempo posible.

desear (to desire)

Desear comes from the noun deseo, meaning "desire". Deseo, in turn, comes from the Latin desidium, meaning "lust", and desidia, meaning "idleness". I'm not sure what desiring something has to do with laziness, unless one is pulling a Pessoa and believing their dreams are better left as dreams since the finished reality can never live up to the imagination...

Or, I suppose, since the woman I love I can only see in dreams, then desire and rest would be intimately intertwined with each other.

I've desired to rest for a very long time, for a very long time. To lie down in permafrost or a shallow grave somewhere and sleep for an unknown amount of time, disturbed by nothing and nobody, and wake up with my body intact and ageless like nothing had happened. While things have slowly been getting better for me in my personal life, and I'm trying to comprehend the fact that there are people who love me, I still can't shake the masochist part of me that insists I deserve nothing but pain, that I've somehow committed some great sin, some great crime against humanity, with no hope of atonement. To have the breath taken from me, snuffed out in a gentle act of mercy so I never hurt anyone ever again, even if it means influencing someone I love to do it against their will...

Estoy acostado en la cama. Las manos de mi amante están alrededor de mi garganta. Las pupilas de sus ojos son pequeños. Su respiración es inestable, como ella va a llorar.

¡Deja de pedirme que te lastime a ti!
¡Lo odio cuando haces esto!
Yo... yo no deseo a matarte.

prometer (to vow)

Prometer comes from the Latin pro, meaning "toward", and mittere, "to send" or "to give". Going further back, the root verb, meter, comes from the Proto-Indo-European meith, "to exchange". I've made a lot of vows in my life, sent them out into the world. Some knowing there would be no chance of ever being fulfilled, some already fulfilled without the other person's knowledge and only made to make myself look like a miracle worker, some kept near to my heart... Maybe, someday, I'll get to exchange a vow with a very special person.

Estoy en la casa que solía ser de mi familia, en el patio delantero. Mi padre está enojado como siempre. Comienza a gritar sobre su deseo de que yo viva sola y que yo soy una decepción.

Mi pecho se aprieta. Decido que he terminado de escucharle. Llamo a mi prometida a mi teléfono y le digo que estoy teniendo un ataque de pánico. Su voz es suave y reconfortante. Ella llegará y me salvará. Mi padre escucha y dice que a la mujer no se le permite venir. Le digo que se decida: ¿estoy suficientemente discapacitado como para necesitar que me proteja, o puedo vivir una vida propia?

Está tan enojado que me encierro en mi habitación por seguridad. No necesito nada, pero de todos modos lleno una bolsa con ropa. Llega mi amante. Escapo por la ventana de mi habitación.

Mi padre nos sigue afuera. Estoy en los brazos de la mujer, y ella está flotando demasiado alto para que él nos alcance.

Mi padre aúlla: "¿Cómo tienes la audacia?"

La mujer responde: "Le prometí que nunca yo le abandonaría."

pasar (to spend (as in time), to pass)

Pasar comes from the Latin term passus, meaning "step". Most of the meanings of this verb have to do with travel: to cross the road, to proceed, to go ahead. Others have to do with the passage of time: ¿Qué te ha pasado? "What happened to you?"

Lately I have not spent much time on the computer. There is simply not much to do anymore. No IRC channels with people worth lurking with, no fast threads on imageboards on topics I would bother dealing with "channer" types to participate in, rarely any fun essays to read. I've been trying to get back into knitting. I think I'd like to make a long vine of flowers to hang up near the ceiling along one of my bedroom walls for my lover's birthday. I think she'd like that, a pre-taste of spring, even if wooly and without the gentle smell live flowers carry with them as if to whisper, "I'm alive, and you're alive, and we're alive together at the same time, even if only for a short while. How lucky we are to get to experience this moment in time. There will be many like it, but never exactly the same as this one." And I wonder what it will be like once we have our own world, our own house, our own front yard with nobody else around for hundreds of miles. A wide bloom of flowers down the mountainside, the firm cradle of a fork of tree roots making a narrow Y, the gentle warmth of the springtime sun on our skin...

Jett está descansando sobre mi pecho. Es en la mitad de la mañana. Su cara está enterrado en mi cuello. Estoy acariciando las alas de ella. Su respiración es lenta y profunda. Creo que va a quedarse dormido.

"¿Lethe? Nunca dije que yo quiero pasar toda mi vida contigo. Pero es cierto."