past tense

In the Spanish language, there are tenses for everything. When learning the language, us laymen are introduced to 2 new tenses: preterito indefinido y imperfecto.

The verbs change in past tense. It’s hard to recognize, when you hear them, what they even really are, unless you are familiar with the tense.

In English, we have tenses as well, but English, being the slutted out, bastardized language it is, we don’t really use all of the tenses properly, unless you teach grammar, and then, if you teach public school in New York City, none of that shit like grammar or really speaking a language properly matters too much anyway. It’s very different to acquiesce these tenses if you aren’t used to them. It’s hard to hear them when someone is speaking. It’s complex to understand when they are put before you on paper, on an assignment… so on.

The subject of past tense is daunting, because it is new, but it is old. It is a more complex way to speak about the past. In English, the past is always the past. You look around the corner and there it is, staring you in the face, reminding you of all your past failures, and past lessons you should have learned from, but didn’t. In English, you are afraid that you will be doomed to repeat your past.

In Spanish, the past is current. It’s all the more difficult, because it doesn’t exist-you have to make it, out of whatever insight you still have in your arsenal. It happens every second you are here, alive and willing to build upon the life you have been given, and the opportunities that God has afforded you. You never thought you could do this. You have always been scared, but now…

You have never had this past before, and this tense (tenses) scare you, because you have nothing to relate it to, but that can be good, because new means you haven’t messed it up yet.

Past tense is hard. There are rules you have to remember, and words you shouldn’t say. There are exceptions to rules and obligations to the tense you must heed if you want anyone to really understand you. It’s difficult, but not impossible. Difficult to float back between the 2 and understand when there is a time to use one, and then the other. Difficult to remember that if you mean 1 and use the other, your words will be lost, and you could suffer the consequences.

I marvel at the subject of the past; and the category of the tenses: imprefectivo and indefinido.

Indefinido is used when you tell facts, when the truth is needed to describe the past, when there is no room for conjecture or politics, just facts, like:

You were born. You lived. You died.

The two of you were together. It fell apart. You parted.

I find it ironic that this cold and withholding rule for the past would be called indefinido. This is the most outright view of the past that anyone can have. This is the view that makes you lie awake in bed sometimes and realize that you messed up. There is no sugar coating it, it is there in black and white, and all you can do let it go and move on.

Which brings you to the imperfect.

You use imperfectivo to express a feeling you had, something connected with time that hasn’t finished. This is the tense that links you to the past, that doesn’t let you go. These are the words you use when you speak of something that isn’t done. It is the past that is the present. It is the before that brings you to the now, and leads you into the hereafter, and makes you wonder what you are here after. I love that it’s called imperfect. I suppose that’s subjective, but who am I but just a laymen with an imperfect past, studying a language…