In Costa Rica, I’d registered to complete four years of high school-level Spanish in sixteen weeks. Each year, compressed into less than a month—quizzes, homework, midterms, finals—repeating on a loop for four months.

That first day, I learned to say my name and age.

The first week, I learned basic conjugations. Their rules. Their exceptions.

On Friday, I made my first set of vocabulary cards.

By Monday’s quiz, I already felt behind.

~

It was now the second month of classes.

I stood at the front of the class, my teacher’s kind face looking at me, dark against the sun in the windows.

“Conjugate tener.”

I did.

“Good. Now—what did you do this weekend?”

I paused. The answer was there somewhere—in rules, in charts, in the margins of my notebook—but not in my mouth. I started once, stopped, then tried again with something smaller, safer.

She waited.

“I went to the beach,”

I said in Spanish.

It wasn’t true, but it was simple enough to finish.

“Okay…let’s try something different. Do what I tell you.”

She gestured toward the door.

I didn’t move.

The class shifted in their chairs. Someone behind me stood and closed it. I watched, started to the door myself, then slumped back to my seat.

That afternoon, I found a desk in the library, my flashcards strewn across the table, as the daily afternoon tropical storms pummeled the library windows.

Claudia pulled up a chair next to me.

“You coming?”

I looked up.

“What?”

“When the storms let up, a bunch of us are going to that coffee shop downtown then maybe play pool. Are you coming?”

I looked at my stack of unfinished homework, the writing assignment I’d hardly started, and then her smiling face.

“No… I just don’t think I can.”

“Your loss.”

Then she got up and left.

I stayed in the library that evening.

The storms passed, the room emptied, and I struggled through my cards alone.