The Last Week of the Language Exchange

Ivy and Nils had been meeting every Tuesday evening for eight months, trading English for Norwegian over coffee that went cold while they talked. It had started as a language exchange app match, two strangers practicing sentences from a phrasebook. Somewhere between the third and fourth month, though, the conversations had stopped being about grammar at all.

Neither of them had mentioned it. They had built an unspoken rule: talk about everything except what was happening between them, because naming it might make it too easy to lose.

Then, on a Tuesday in early October, Nils arrived with news instead of homework. His visa was ending, and his company was transferring him back to Oslo in eleven days. He had known for three weeks and had been putting off telling her, hoping, he admitted, that the right moment would arrive on its own.

"You should have told me sooner," Ivy said. She wasn't sure if she was angrier at him, or at herself for not asking why he had seemed distracted lately.

"I know," he said. "I kept thinking I'd find a way to bring it up that didn't sound like a big deal. It is a big deal, though, isn't it?"

She didn't answer right away. If they had said something months earlier, they might have had more than eleven days to figure out what they wanted. Instead, they had spent eight months circling a conversation neither of them was brave enough to start.

"I don't know what this is supposed to become," Ivy finally said, "but I don't want to pretend it's nothing just because it's inconvenient."

Nils reached across the table and, for the first time since they had met, took her hand instead of her cup. They didn't solve anything that night. They didn't promise long-distance calls or plane tickets they couldn't yet afford.

But they agreed, quietly, to stop rehearsing sentences in a language neither of them needed anymore, and to say, plainly, what they actually meant.