The Bilingual Grammar of Goodbye

Au Revoir

In French, a goodbye can be an au revoir, a ‘until we see each other again.’ It has a built-in hope, a grammatical loophole for return. In English, it is a finality. A fracture. Goodbye. You learn this not in a classroom on Rue Saint-Denis, but in the aching silence that follows a slamming door on Rue Drolet.

We build our hearts in one language and try to dismantle them in another. The words never fit. The sharp, elegant precision of a French insult (“Tu es l’erreur que je continue de répéter”) loses its poetic sting when translated to the clumsy, “You are the mistake I keep making.” The anger becomes pathetic, the sorrow mundane.

Consider Gainsbourg. Je t'aime... moi non plus. Beautilful in French, impossible in English. "I love you... me neither."

Language.

You are quieter in English, they said. You are crueler in French, you replied. And both statements were true, because each language holds a different shade of your soul. One for the marketplace, the other for the confessional. We love in the space between the two, in the untranslatable gap where je t’aime and I love you are similar, but not the same sound, not the same weight on the tongue.

Montreal is a city built for this kind of heartbreak. The Plateau holds the ghosts of your French whispers, while the Downtown skyscrapers echo with your English rationalizations. You haunt the same dépanneur, but you buy your wine at different hours. Some cities are archives of missing persons. Ours is a bilingual dictionary where all the definitions lead back to you.