other side of the rotation

The world has rotated greatly since the last time we met. I think the sun may be a little more yellow, but it's hard to focus on the color when the light hits the eyes so mercilessly.
I no longer frolic across the green hills of east Texas. No, I've changed positions to a distant land, not half way across the country but halfway across the globe.
The stage is set differently. For one, most of the players don't understand my monologues. I now speak in short, half sentences, butchered bits of English syntax that bleed when they protrude from my mouth and cry out at me, staining my clothes with the leaks from their amputations and infecting the listener with language gangrene. Most often, the other players don't notice. To them these Frankenstein-ian monsters come out as golden children; the players wonder and awe at the quickness or struggle, smilingly, to reproduce such grand elements of a foreign tongue. I go home with the guilt of an international murder for I just told one player "neko wo tabemas" in a desperate attempt to communicate with another human. But I told a cat-lover that "I eat cats" rather than "I like cats". And we laugh. And we learn how not to say things that sound violent against cats. And we laugh. And we learn the names of colors, of scissors, of circles, of squares, of bugs. It is all a very fun game.
Yet when a teacher who teaches me walks in with a heavy head and cold eyes, I can only say, "red scissors" when I want to say, "bleeding heart?".
I am such a newborn to this side of the rotating planet. I've not even a chance to get lost in translation because I cannot even find the words with which to translate.
I've had to move away from the monologues. I'm a practicing mime. I point here, pat there, gesture this gesture that. I gesticulate around the words that I do not understand, bowing to their ancientness in our first meeting--or was it our tenth or twentieth? I'm an impolite learner, never remembering a face.
So I dance every day at school. I smile and wave and make my language a carnival of the grotesque so that--please, oh please--the children I run into in the halls will find it intriguing and will want to learn, so that the adults will find me friendly and not find the frustration that plays pop-a-mole with me.
Can you hear that song? It's the song found in each others being. It's the sound of our souls, which sing as surely as the planets. If it were not for this song, we would never understand each other for music is the speech of the mute parts of our souls.
I'm certain I am guilty of great paradoxes in thought and greater inaccuracies of mind. In a place where I must be mute, I've begun to listen. If this is all I learn on this side of the rotation, it will be enough.