I think that everyone has memories of *that one* person from your childhood. It might have been someone you saw once and never again. It might have been the partner that sat at your desk in school for 5 whole years.

Marina was an interesting girl. Maybe it was because she always sat at my desk. Maybe it was because she was the smartest in our whole class of 7-year-olds. Maybe it was because she could speak every language under the sun.

What you would call a ‘polyglot’, I say, myself being terrible at English and not from here I found her an excellent friend in Primary School. And not only myself, but a huge portion of other classmates pulled here from the edges of the world, squashed in between the rest who spoke flawlessly for a 7-year-old in an English-speaking school.

Marina spoke English better than even any of them. Marina spoke Russian. She spoke Spanish, German, even Japanese. She spoke Italian and Arabic, Polish and Finnish and languages that even now would have taken me years of my life to comprehend. She would amaze us each and every day, and from being a thoughtless kid I never understood how much skill that took. Maybe she was taught from the moment she was born? Maybe she was simply a genius? I don’t know, but now I don’t even want to.

Naturally we became friends fast, and the warmth she made me feel when she would talk to me in my language, I will never be able to replicate. She started inviting me and my other foreign, 7-year-old friends for dinner, play dates, and then even sleepovers – classic nostalgia from childhood days, and fun that I don’t think I will ever experience again.

There was only one thing I always found strange about her, apart from her amazing skills in language. I saw her, a few times in the night, when I couldn’t fall asleep and would wonder looking for the bathroom. I would see her talking to the walls. I would see her talking to the ceilings and floors, in a language that was none that I had ever heard before. I doubt it existed, even, but I would watch her talking like to a person, and in the morning we would all walk to school together and it was like nothing ever happened, but that would end soon.

I stopped playing with Marina when I saw the walls talk back to her.