Between the lines
a short story about complicated love
A month ago, I wrote on otherness and acquiring an adoptive language. It’s complicated love. Today, I’m sharing a short story called Between the Lines, which, in a way, is linked to that previous post. The story first appeared in Bulgarian in an anthology dedicated to the complexities of love. This is an English translation, which hasn’t been published elsewhere. Happy reading.
Wake up! Hey, wake up!
The words rose to the surface like bubbles in a glass of fizzy water, popping in the air. I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was her worried face leaning over me. Her curls barely brushed my forehead, tickling my nose until I sneezed. I noticed her concern shift into relief and then, a moment later, harden into anger.
“What were you doing? You could have killed yourself! Get up now!”
I glanced around. I was sprawled on the marble floor of the school corridor. The smell of soup from the canteen reached my nostrils, and I felt nauseous. My classmates stood around us in a silent circle, staring.
That’s when it hit me.
It had all started as a stupid children’s game. You suck your thumb, hold your breath, puff out your cheeks, and blow with all your might: one, two, three... By the time I mentally counted to ten, I had lost consciousness and collapsed. A white spot. A black void.
Silence. For just a few seconds.
Seconds in which my brain stopped sending and receiving signals.
My classmates thought I was overacting, pretending to faint far too convincingly. Their laughter reached me as a stretched, muffled, grotesque sound. The English teacher’s words broke through the noise, pulled me back to reality like a suction cup lifting me from the floor.
“Wake up!”
The English teacher was a real Englishwoman from Bristol, here on a one-year placement through some sort of teacher exchange programme. When her voice wrenched me out of temporary unconsciousness, an unfamiliar energy coursed through my seven-year-old body. I was convinced her words had saved me.
We picked him up on the way to Burgas, shortly after the turnoff for Stara Zagora. It was clear from the start that he wasn’t one of us.
A foreigner.
My father had a habit of picking up hitchhikers. He often took them along the road. We were travelling to Sozopol, the boot packed to bursting, but my father spotted him from afar and slowed the car.
At a roadside stop, next to a large canvas rucksack, stood a boy of about twenty with his thumb out. He wore jeans and a checkered shirt tied around his waist. His shoulder-length blond hair fell across his face, half-hidden by his fringe.
“Burgas?” The accent gave him away instantly.
“You’re in luck. We’re going there too. Hop in the back. Juji, translate into English—that’s what you’re learning at school, isn’t it?”
I hated it when they used silly nicknames for me in front of strangers, but I bit my tongue. Staring at the edge of my summer sandals, I mumbled, “My father said you’re lucky; we’re going that way too.”
I could feel the redness creeping up my face, and I knew it wasn’t from the August heat.
While my mother smiled nervously and gestured for him to take the back seat beside me, my father somehow crammed the oversized rucksack into the boot. The boy clutched a book in his hands, ready to open it—clearly prepared for a journey without unnecessary chatter.
“I’m Jake. How do you do?”
“What did the foreigner say?”
“He said his name was Jake.”
“Hi, Jake.” My mother turned around to shake his hand, but he either didn’t notice or pretended not to. Her hand hung awkwardly in the air. “Ask him where he’s from. And if he’s hungry. I’ll check what’s left of the cake.”
“Mum, please! Leave him alone.”
“Wait, wait. I’m sure he’s hungry. Who knows how long it’s been since the poor boy’s eaten.” She opened a plastic bag of sliced cake and held it out to Jake. “Take some, Jake. Tell him, Juji.”
“Please take it. It’s, um… my mother’s cake.”
I cringed at my clumsy English, the clunky grammar. Anxiety clung to my throat, smashing words like walnut shells.
“Your mother made it? Thank you, I’ll try it then.” He ate a piece. “Is your name… Juji?”
“No, no. Um… it’s Maya.”
“Nice to meet you, Maya.”
“Where are you from?”
“Boston. The Boston in the US, not the one in England.”
“I didn’t know there was a Boston in England.”
(A pause. A very long pause. My father turned on the car radio to break the silence.)
“The Beatles?” He looked at the boy in the rear-view mirror, but instead of replying, Jake began humming the tune, which amused my father. “See? We’ve found a common language.”
“What… uh… what are you doing here?”
“You mean why I’m travelling in Bulgaria? I’ve taken a gap year from university to travel across Europe. Before life eats me for breakfast, you know. Before it pulls me into different corners, responsibilities, and whatnot. Have you been to other countries?”
“No.”
(Another pause. Even longer than the previous one. Jake opened his book and began reading.)
He sat mere inches away from me, and his presence stirred something within me—something no one else had ever stirred in my fifteen years of life. I gathered his English words in invisible handfuls before they rolled from his lips. His otherness drove me mad. Every slight movement of the car brought our shoulders into reluctant contact, and a strange, fiery sensation tumbled through my stomach. I wanted to ask him so many things, but my thoughts were chaotic, my mouth frozen. Before I could form a sentence, my tongue, like an eraser, wiped it clean. A blank page. I cursed myself silently for wasting time on the phone with friends when I could have been studying English.
If I listened closely, I could hear his heartbeat. I felt his breath, imagining him inhaling the air I had just exhaled, warming it within his chest before returning it to our shared space in a thin stream. At one point, he closed his book and turned to me; I froze.
“You’ve got such green eyes! Beautiful!”
Was he talking about my green eyes? Did he feel something for me—the foreign girl who barely spoke his language—as I felt for him, his body so close to mine, his American accent thrilling me?
“All those mountains here are just breathtaking!”
I bit my lip, clenched it until it hurt, and lowered my gaze.
We dropped him off at the first bus stop in Burgas. As we drove away, I noticed his book on the seat beside me. Had he forgotten it, or had he left it on purpose? Only then did I read the title: Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. One of the pages was dog-eared. I opened it and read the underlined passage:
“Christ, it's embarrassing--I start thinking about this goddam poem I sent her when we first started goin' around together. `Rose my color is. and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.' Christ, it's embarrassing--it used to remind me of her. She doesn't have green eyes--she has eyes like goddam sea shells, for Chrissake.”
I closed the book before my parents or sister could see me, and I slipped it into my rucksack.
The language is an organ
that develops in childhood alongside other parts of the body, I read on the internet. Learning a foreign language is like implanting a foreign organ: even if you accept it as part of yourself, it never truly becomes your own. It always retains the potential to be rejected over time—forgotten, atrophied, lying dormant.
At fifteen, language first pierced the membrane of what I understood as familiar and mine, sharply breaking through. Despite the effort required to learn a foreign language, the joy it brought me was immeasurably greater. I fell in love with it without realising—playfully, unsuspectingly. I imagined it sneaking up behind me, wrapping its arms around me, spinning the world around.
At first, my relationship with English was superficial and fickle. I loved listening to music—favourite tracks by British or American bands—and memorising phrases that I later used awkwardly and out of place in conversations with friends. I was fascinated by the rebellious, free sound of the words, and I absorbed them like delicate biscuits—crispy and sweet at once.
Hold on to the thread
The currents will shift
Guide me towards you
Know something's left
And we're all allowed to dream
Of the next time we touch…
(Ocean by Pearl Jam, Ten)
I thought that, like everything else at fifteen, this fascination would prove fleeting.
Years passed.
A decade later—
I had the chance to travel to the island on a work assignment. My colleagues and I were sent by the television station where I worked to film a documentary about the London Underground. We had about a month, and although the filming days were intense, the weekends were mine alone. I woke up early, eager to embrace the city.
I loved walking in the mornings. Seeing the city awaken, tickled by the aroma of warm coffee, soaking in the scents of freshly baked croissants and doughnuts, watching it stretch and push back its covers at dawn.
I wandered the London streets for hours, inhaling the fragrance of flowers from gardens in front of old houses, the aroma of spices and fresh fish from open markets, the coolness of dew that had fallen overnight. I walked along the canals, envying the owners of colourful boats docked along the shore like canaries. I sank into the city’s soft folds, eventually slipping into a neighbourhood pub. I ordered a dark ale with white fish and crispy chips, watching the locals and eavesdropping on their lively conversations until they kicked me out along with the last of the patrons.
It happened unexpectedly:
Jamais vu—
to rediscover something long familiar,
to see it with new eyes and fall in love with it anew.
It was a Saturday afternoon when a group of boys and girls sitting in a circle in the garden behind St Paul’s Cathedral caught my attention. They looked about the same age as the students in my film studies course. They were chatting, laughing loudly. Dressed casually in worn jeans, T-shirts, or checkered shirts, they had piled their rucksacks in the centre of the circle, decorated with badges like pin cushions.
I sat on a bench and watched one of the girls. Her gaze was greenish, framed in black eyeliner, and her short haircut delicately framed the oval of her face. It occurred to me that she resembled me at her age. My parallel self—existing in a different time and place simultaneously. My self that spoke perfect English, flirted with words, used them effortlessly, and commanded their attention and obedience. I felt a pang of jealousy for her freedom of expression, her ability to communicate in that language with such skill.
I closed my eyes and let the sunlight sketch my face with the shadows of leaves.
That moment shifted something within me. The spark had long been lit; it only needed a gentle breath to reignite. This time, my affair with the English language was passionate and all-consuming. I soaked up every stray conversation, stopped passers-by deliberately to ask for nonexistent addresses, just to prolong my exchanges with them, to steal more of the rustle of their speech, the elegant movements of their lips as they formed the words.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you, Miss.”
They apologised and walked on. I stood there, watching them go, breathless with excitement, flushed with shyness, and anticipating the inevitable sadness of the approaching farewell.
I wanted to stay, but fear drove me to leave.
Separation
I couldn’t stop thinking about it—on the contrary, the farther I ran, the stronger the pull.
A month later, back home, the streets of Sofia felt empty, wrinkled, uninteresting. As I walked down Slaveykov, instead of the noisy market, my mind painted the vibrant stalls of Brixton Village. Instead of the pigeons perched on benches in Zaimov Park, I imagined the squirrels of Hyde Park, glancing around suspiciously. Instead of the golden domes of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the sunlit hands of Big Ben sparkled, blinding me.
There was no place to hear English speech. Silence enveloped me. Or perhaps I absorbed it, feeling its heaviness and stickiness lodged in my chest.
I loitered around city-centre hotels, peering around corners like a beggar, hoping to catch tourists speaking English.
Just a few words from them, a few minutes to hear their conversations.
I shut myself in at home, drew the curtains, and stayed in bed until noon. I didn’t even want to watch television. English films that once seemed fascinating and original now felt like pale imitations of what I had taken them for: living language. Improvised. Genuine. Spontaneous. I refused to go out, to meet others. I refused to feed myself with borrowed words.
Withdrawal, complete with all its side effects.
I re-read the only English book I owned— Nine Stories by Salinger. My reading was laboured, gasping. Like a love letter, I caressed it, fell asleep with it under my duvet, pressing it to my lonely body, waking next to it in the morning.
I could only think of it. Like every love at a distance.
While I burned with passion for the English language, it had no desire to be loved or accepted by someone like me. To me, it was something different, exciting—a way to dream of another life, a life like in the movies. What could I offer in return? Awkward pronunciation, countless grammatical mistakes on every line I wrote, a constant mixing of tenses.
Present continuous.
Past perfect.
Future perfect.
I got used to the separation slowly. Gradually, the memory began to fade. The words and language rules I had learned started to thin out, to fray like an old piece of fabric and tear apart. Another ten years passed before the future perfect became the present.
And yet, it is possible.
I rent a flat on the ground floor of a century-old Victorian house in Finsbury Park. My apartment is small, but it’s bright and perfectly adequate. Every morning, the alarm on my phone wakes me at 7:45. I get dressed and head to London Metropolitan University, where I teach Film Studies. On the way, I grab a cortado from The Roasting Shed, a charming café. I sip it slowly as I walk the twenty minutes to work. I know how lucky I am not to have to jostle through the morning crush on public transport. And how lucky I am to live in complete harmony with the love of my life. After so many separations and reunions, we are together, and our bond is stronger than ever.
At first, my native language often grew jealous.
It undermined my confidence, rearranged my sentences, forced me to make mistakes, and made me doubt my syntax. It hid the right words, leaving me searching for them.
I worried that others would think I couldn’t express myself “properly.”
But what is proper?
Courage.
When you speak boldly, no one cares about your grammar mistakes. But I wasn’t bold; I was honest, and honesty made me vulnerable.
So, it made scenes in public, causing me to blush with shame. My native language dominated the situation, while I stumbled through words with a clumsy accent, because it didn’t want to let me go easily. It appeared at the most inopportune moments—when I was with colleagues, friends, or ordering dinner in a restaurant. It would barge into conversations abruptly, without warning, rudely.
It followed my every step, hid in the shadows of the streets, and emerged whenever I thought I’d escaped it. It wouldn’t leave me alone with English. It eyed it suspiciously—the foreign language come to take its place. I half-expected it to punch English square in the mouth, shattering its vocabulary to pieces.
I felt threatened. It prevented me from expressing myself well, from sounding intelligent, erudite, educated. Instead, I began sentences three times, made mistakes, corrected myself, searched for the right words, and often left meanings hanging in the air. I relied on gestures, on facial expressions. I knew how foolish I must have looked.
“I am so much more than the limits this foreign language imposes on me,” I wanted to shout. But even that, I wasn’t sure how to phrase correctly.
I realised I would probably never be completely independent of my native language. That it would always leave a mark on my pronunciation, no matter how diligently I studied English or how long I lived here. I would carry it on my skin like a scar that could never be hidden—my exile birthmark. Because every attempt to tear away something that was once part of you, leaves—
a scar.
I decided not to force it, to give both languages time to adjust to each other’s presence, to get to know each other, to accept and perhaps even like each other. Slowly, step by step.
I started with casual conversations with acquaintances, with people in my neighbourhood. I commented on the weather and weekend plans. I bought a book in English, underlined every unfamiliar word, wrote them in a notebook, and looked up their meanings. The underlined words outnumbered the others. Then I bought a second book, a third. I filled all the shelves in my apartment with them, reading and collecting unfamiliar words like treasures, like children hoard trinkets, storing them in a drawer to revisit later when they feel like playing again.
I still—
accumulate unfamiliar words,
but I don’t give up. When I’m alone, I open my notebook, run my fingers over the pages, letting my gaze glide over the words, mentally kissing each one. I whisper them, thrilled by their sound, their rhythm merging with the beat of my heart, becoming one with my speech.
I love my evenings at home. I prefer them to noisy gatherings filled with inevitable small talk, with words that don’t matter to anyone, with conversations for the sake of talking. I feel observed at such moments, examined under a magnifying glass. I dress up my vocabulary, trying to pronounce sentences slowly and clearly, adorning them with embellishments, special words to impress my companions, structuring my speech carefully, leaning on memorised phrases like scaffolding to keep my language from collapsing. I leave exhausted.
That’s why I prefer quiet evenings, alone with the words of this once-foreign language that still excites and surprises me. We give each other attention, grow accustomed to each other’s presence, adapt to coexistence. This, too, requires effort.
And care.
(Like any love.)
I pick a book, prepare a portion of text, devour it hungrily, licking my fingers. I don’t follow recipes; I love to improvise. I immerse myself in the text, pause at unfamiliar words, look them up in a dictionary, learn how they can be used in sentences, exploring every nuance—like spices without which the text would remain flavourless.
We’re learning to live together, this foreign language and I. It’s no longer so foreign. We’re discovering each other through the daily life we share, revealing ourselves little by little, shedding our barriers at night without shame.
Our love is reciprocal: we make compromises, accept each other’s stubbornness, and adjust to habits we may not always like.
In return, I get a gentle embrace around my waist on a Sunday morning—a step taken barefoot behind me, hair still tousled, moving close enough to surprise me as I make pancakes.
The gentle embrace is the ability to express myself freely in this other language, to be accepted as I am—with my accent, my occasional mistakes, and my grammatical missteps. The gentle embrace is a sign that the distance between us has diminished. I’ve kept my authenticity, and finally, I feel accepted.
One such sign is enough to know that you’ve made the right choice.
In such moments, harmony is complete.
I write in my notebook:
“There is something fascinating about the relationship between the place where stories are born and the language in which they are told.”
I find it increasingly challenging to speak and write in Bulgarian about places and events that happen in London, and vice versa. Each language “guards” its territory—both as a geographical concept and in terms of meaning. They’ve stopped being jealous of each other, stopped fighting for my attention, stopped courting me at the same time. They simply don’t talk to each other. Each has taken its place, stepping forward only when necessary.
Sometimes funny things happen. For example, when I meet one of “my own”—a Croatian, a Pole, a Bosnian. The languages mix, intertwine. Although the conversation is in English, our shared adopted tongue, someone will suddenly slip into their own—Croatian, Polish, or Bosnian. If we are “our own,” we must be able to understand each other in our native tongues. Mistakes become shelters for the emigrant, who with each slip momentarily returns home.
Where is home?
Is language a place, or is it a feeling of happiness?
I left home as a geographical concept long ago, but only now am I emigrating linguistically. This process of migration is long and requires much greater effort, but the similarities are evident: once again, I’m packing myself into a suitcase, carefully selecting the items, transferring my identity to this new linguistic territory, being cautious not to carry unnecessary cultural habits and prejudices—they are the stones that weigh you down and must be left behind to make arrival possible.
Over time, things begin to shift, and I realise that now English has settled into my daily life for good, and I can’t get rid of it, even when I want to be alone for an hour. I can’t afford to expel it—it’s essential for survival in this other country that, like the language, I am on the verge of adopting. More and more often, I find that now my native language is the one I miss. I search for cracks in time, gaps through which I can slip and reach “my own.” I live with one but think of the other. I increase the frequency of phone calls with family and friends, to their surprise and delight. I order Bulgarian books, which take weeks to arrive. I cross half the city to buy a banitsa with boza from a Bulgarian bakery—not for the banitsa, but to say, “Thank you. Have a nice day.” In Bulgarian.
Before leaving for London, a friend gave me—
a compass.
“So you’ll always find the right direction,” he said when we said goodbye. I think about that compass more and more. And about the right direction. Because direction is a choice. A choice to love yourself, to change, and to accept yourself.
When does a foreign language become your own?
When you start dreaming in it, they say.
I dream in two languages now, and I know there is space within me for both.
We are one.
I hope you' enjoyed the short story. If you did, please share and subscribe - it makes a huge difference, and I thank you.
Until next time,
Nataliya x