(This is especially tricky, that as you walk home with your "F" you feel sure your dad will see you in one way or another. The reality of who he is, "who's there" as your father is skewed by your own imagination. And so, as sometimes happens, you go home with a friend to who you say, "You see, that's how my dad is, always getting angry at me." And your friend says, "wow, I didn't see it that way. Are you sure you are not being over-sensitive and imagining his anger?")
Understanding each other can be tricky because even if I write or say something "clear" like "bus" and ask you to close your eyes and imagine what I mean, you might see a school bus or a city bus or perhaps the letters "b-u-s?" Admittedly, these distinctions won't matter much if I start to cross the street and you see a big vehicle headed my way and yell "BUS!" at me as a warning. But that's using words to survive, which is to say that yelling at me is more effective than drawing a picture of a big vehicle about to run someone over and waving it around in my direction from the sidewalk.
Yet after I dodge the bus and get out of the street and want to tell you how frighted I was and thankful to you I am, you and I will no longer be using words as tools of survival but as tools to understand life and how it feels, what it means, as we often say, to be human.
But we can only do this if we speak the same language. Just the intonation of how you yelled bus at me might have gotten me to jump out of the way. But If I speak English and you speak Shona, our conversation after I am safe will be limited.
and that were the world being presented on the other side of the barrier that divides audience/ghosts from people pretending to be people they are not.