Fluent, Almost

Notes on learning Spanish with great conviction, and my brief but passionate career as a future expat

**The benefits of deleting a Substack account - your essays about “nothing really” can get their second edition publication**

A couple of years ago, in the middle of quite a difficult personal and family time, I decided I was going to learn Spanish.

The thought arrived fully formed, as these things always do, and I had no choice but to obey. Every Tuesday evening for sixteen weeks I battled bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic into town, arriving late, heart racing, convinced I was about to miss the one thing that would finally save me. But I never missed a single class. Not one. The Irish winter traffic may have tried its best, but it was no match for my newly emerged passion.

What brought it on? Hard to say. Probably the desperate yearning for the warm sunshine that’s been missing from the Irish scenery for.. roughly eleven months of the year. Before the first lesson had even started, in my mind, I was already living my new life: sunlit Spanish small-town streets, coffee and sangria for breakfast, tapas for lunch, siesta in a whitewashed townhouse with wooden shutters, warm breeze, palm trees, the distant sound of waves. That was my future the moment I learnt Spanish - as if conjugating verbs could magically relocate the entire Atlantic and turn West of Ireland into Andalusia.

I loved the classes from the beginning. Our Mexican teacher was just lovely. Like literally, you couldn't with for a better one. She patiently explained the differences between South American and European Spanish. And honestly? It was surprisingly easy from the start - I’d done French and Italian at school (even though I’ve since forgotten both of them, obviously). I spent half the lessons quietly judging my teenage self: why on earth did I pick those languages when Spanish had been right there the whole time?

My teacher also accidentally reignited my old obsession with South America. Suddenly I wasn’t just learning Spanish - I was moving to Argentina. I saw myself dancing tango in Buenos Aires, sipping yerba mate on a balcony, planning epic trips to Patagonia. I had the whole future mapped out. Arthritis in my older years in the Irish damp? Not for me, thank you. I would be that elegant, multilingual woman in linen trousers, effortlessly ordering another round of empanadas in a country, in which the rain forgot how to fall.

I did every single homework. I really locked in. I was truly, 100% committed.

Then the term ended, summer started, and.. poof. The passion vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

The only Spanish left in my daily life is Manu Chao’s “Me Gustas Tú” on my favourite Spotify playlist (mi corazón still gets a little workout every time it comes on, which is nearly every morning, I guess.. I have a strong routine established when it comes to my playlists).

The half-used textbook is somewhere in the same drawer as all other well intended but never finished projects. Another beautiful hyperfixation, another glorious identity I tried on for one sparkling season.

The expat dream hasn't quite materialised - and honestly, it probably won't any time soon. But a few winter breaks in the south of Spain might be exactly enough. I can't stand the heat of a Spanish summer anyway, so a short escape in November, sangria in hand, watching the sun do things the Irish sky simply refuses to do - that's the version of the dream that might actually work. And maybe that's the point. If sangria for breakfast became permanent, it would just become breakfast. And possibly a liver damage. The magic lives in the temporary.