Aguanta

My wife and I are empty nesters now.

The empty nest changes the acoustics of a house. There's more silence. More space for thoughts, words, and for music.

Most nights we cook to music. Jazz, sometimes. French chanson when she's nostalgic. And often, because I can't help myself, Spanish songs that pull me back to places she didn't grow up in.

She speaks three languages fluently. French is her first. Her English is flawless. Her Spanish, confident and clear. But the other night, listening to Bachata, a word kept surfacing that stopped her cold.

"Aguanta."

She asked what it meant. This is not the first time she's asked the same question about this word.

And I always pause. Because I know too much.

Aguanta means to hold, to hold on, to hold off, to endure, to bear, to sustain, to keep going, to suffer through, to stomach it, to carry it. The list doesn't end. It just keeps unfolding, depending on who's saying it and what they're carrying when they do.

Because Aguanta isn't a word you define. It's a posture. A way of standing when the ground gives in.

It's what they said when they poured Mentiole on your wound. What your grandmother says when you're crying and she's holding your face. "Aguanta, muchacho!" It's what you tell yourself when the rent is due and the check is about to bounce. It's what immigrants know in their bones. Not as etymology, but as fact.

I tried to translate. "It's like... endure. But also, hold on. Keep going. Don't give up."

She nodded. But I could see the gap.

There's no English word that carries all of that at once. Aguanta is survival with teeth and resilience masked with patience.

I often think about the gap between translation and truth. About words that refuse definition because they're not just language. They're the DNA of how a people survive.

You don't translate Aguanta with a synonym. You translate it with stories. You translate it with your hands, with your voice, with the way your face changes when you say it.

And even then, something's lost.

But here's what I've learned, standing in that kitchen with my wife, between the sizzle and the beat of Bachata still playing in the background:

She doesn't need to be Dominican to understand me. She doesn't need to carry Aguanta the way I do. She just needs to be willing to sit with it. To ask the second question. To let me tell her about the weight underneath the word. To honor the gap instead of rushing to close it.

I often think of that gap, not just in language, but in how we truly know each other.

That's the language that matters most. Not fluency in Spanish, but fluency in me.

Because being known isn't about being understood at a glance. It's about being willing to be known. And that requires someone on the other side who doesn't just hear your words. They hear what your words are carrying.

Someone who listens not to answer, but to understand. Whose empathy recognizes suffering before you name it. Someone with the patience to hold space for what you're not yet ready to say.

That's the difference between translation and communion.

There's a line I love, borrowed and bent from Shakespeare: To be, or not to be.

In Spanish, it lands differently: Ser, o no ser.

But I prefer it even simpler, the way it sounds when I say it: Se eh', o no se eh'.

You are, or you are not.

And the difference. The entire difference. It's often just someone listening. Someone willing to sit in your kitchen, listen to your music, and ask about the words you can't translate.

That's how we become real to each other. That's how we stay.