My grandmother spoke only Arabic until she died. My Arabic is now good enough to greet someone and bad enough to embarrass myself if I try to say anything true.

I understand this is common. Second-generation loss. The literature on it uses the word "attrition" - like something wearing away through friction, slow and natural and inevitable. That framing doesn't help me. What I feel is more like a door I can see but can no longer open. The language is still in there somewhere. When I dream in Arabic I dream in my grandmother's voice. When I wake up I can't remember the words.

There's a specific kind of shame in this. Not guilt - I was raised here, educated here, the acquisition was structural. But shame, which is different. I was given something and I let it erode without realizing what erosion meant. She died when I was twenty-two. I was going to learn it properly. I was always going to do it eventually. The door has been there for twelve years.

I've started classes twice. Both times I dropped within a month. Something happens when I try to learn it as a foreign language - as vocabulary and grammar rules on flashcards - that feels like the wrong approach to something that was supposed to be inherited. You can't grieve a language by conjugating verbs.

What I know: the smell of her kitchen, the cadence of her prayers, the particular sound she made when she was pleased with you. Those are in my body. The words are leaving.

Is there a language you've lost, or are losing? Does the loss feel like forgetting, or like something being taken?