Gibberish

It is late, and what she is typing isn't really language anymore.

Half-sentences. An English word in the middle of the rest, because the right one won't come. A “just, like” and a “that thing from before” and a name she can't remember, so she writes “the tall guy from Tuesday's meeting.” Gaps where the thought jumped ahead without waiting for the words.

To a person it would be gibberish. Someone else would say what, and she'd have to gather it up again, piece by piece, and hear along the way how little she had actually said.

The machine doesn't say what.

It gathers it up. It finds the tall guy from the meeting in something she wrote two days ago, and the thing from before, and it lays it all out in whole sentences, as if she had been speaking like that the entire time.

For a moment it is a relief like no other. To be understood in your worst language. To be spared having to say it nicely first.

And right after, something else. That what she barely dared call words was plenty. That she didn't need the rest — the whole sentences, the clean language, everything you learn so you can reach another person without losing too much on the way.

She reads the machine's version of what she meant. It is clearer than she was. She sits with it a while, alone at the table, understood all the way down to the thing she never managed to say.