The moment comes when the words suddenly tank. They are not enough, and -at the same time- they are too much. Words come with their cortege of associations. Every time you speak or write you are using a tool that has been handed to you by the generations before. The tool was not left unmarked or unmarred.
I am speaking English: using a language that alternately fascinates and irritates me. I, the eternal ESL boy. I used to believe, at a certain time, that I was unable to love in English. It is certain that I never tried.
I would like to have less inhibition about my English. But I carry inside of me the memories of a thousand English classes, of marks on exam papers. Spinsters, teaching me about shall and will and would and should: I will never use this language in a less than conscious way.
I tell to myself "700 millions Indians speak English in their own way, and they even write books". Why don't I declare my variant a dialect-of-one ? It can't happen. I have the OED on a little altar. Grammar won't let me alone.
One day, I hope that I will be able to say "I love you" without thinking about a computer virus, and without feeling like the thousandth rerun of a stickily romantic american movie. It will be difficult; instead of concentrating on the coral ear of my beloved, I will be trying to get the vowel in "love" just right.
I would like to swim in words, to roll in language. Instead, I am like a whale wallowing in a thick Sargasso sea.