Our First Language

One summer evening in 2014, while traveling through Spain with my mother, I wandered through Retiro Park just as the sun began to set. The golden light cast long, soft shadows, and there, tucked away from the hum of the city, I saw them—a couple playing backgammon, their world so self-contained it felt as though no one else existed.

I hesitated before approaching. Would I interrupt something sacred? But I was mesmerised. The way they moved, the way they leaned toward each other, the flicker of smiles playing at their lips, the rhythm of their hands on the board—there was a story in their gestures, one I wanted to remember.

I asked if I could take their photo.

At first, they laughed, exchanging a glance that carried years of unspoken understanding. Then, turning back to me, they said, "We can’t believe it. Everywhere we’ve traveled, someone has asked to take our photo while we play."

They told me about all the places they'd been, about how strangers—like me—had felt drawn to capture them. They said it was special, how the same scene could be framed so differently depending on who was watching, how it never quite looked the same twice.

"Tonight’s our last night in the city," they told me. "And no one had asked for a photo until now. We thought maybe this time, it wouldn’t happen."

I was so glad I had asked.

They called me "our camera girl" and invited me to sit with them. They showed me how to play. We talked. We laughed. I adored these two, the way they were so at ease, so open, so playful with life. I wondered if they knew what they had—how rare it was to be so attuned to one another, to have cultivated something so simple yet so rich.

I hope, wherever they are now, they are still in love. And if not with each other, then with life itself. I hope they are still playing, still ordering three different meals from the menu just to share, still laughing like they did that night.

I think of them now, and I think of the first language humans ever had—the language of hands.

Before words, there were gestures.

And there was nothing primitive about it, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. In the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less.

There was no division between speech and life. The work of building a house, of kneading dough, of threading a needle—these were not just tasks, but expressions. A hand shielding the face from sudden noise meant I am afraid. A finger tracing the curve of a lover’s shoulder meant I see you. Even in stillness, something was being said.

Naturally, there were misunderstandings. A scratch of the nose, mistaken for a gesture of regret. A wave, confused for dismissal. Lovers who thought, for a fleeting, aching moment, that love had been withdrawn when it had only been a trick of timing.

And yet, because no one carried the illusion of perfect understanding, because everyone knew how easily meaning could slip and scatter, people learned to ask. Did I hear you right? Did I understand?

Sometimes, these misunderstandings became necessary. They created a space to say forgive me—and, in time, the act of opening a palm became the universal sign for asking forgiveness.

Perhaps this is why, at large gatherings or in unfamiliar places, our hands sometimes hover, unsure, restless, as though they remember something we have forgotten.

It’s not that we have lost the language of gestures entirely.

The habit of moving our hands while we speak is an echo of it. Clapping, pointing, giving a thumbs-up—these are remnants, ways of remembering how it feels to say nothing, together.

And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

This is the history of love.

And in the end, it is not spoken, but moved—played out across tabletops in the flick of a backgammon piece, in the way fingers brush absentmindedly across skin, in the simple act of pausing, looking up, and really seeing someone.

Let us not forget it.