Page 50 of The Secret to Belonging

but you are doing it

you are functioning

in another language

in another culture

when you stop one day at the library

and discover a whole wall of English books

you feel like a sailor sighting land

after months of rowing hard at sea

reading English becomes the respite

your brain craves at the end of every day

genre matters not

you read everything

at night alone

you inhabit an interior room formed from fluency

tucked cozy into the bed of your mother tongue

finding relief in dreams of understanding

and understood

the first time you dream in Norwegian

you wake elated

a milestone for all exchange students

a rite of passage

dreams and jokes

key benchmarks of comprehension

and you’ve just hit a level of fluency

you’ve been striving for

you discover

if you read in English before bed

you’ll dream in English

if you read in norsk before bed

you’ll dream in norsk