BY: Maria Daniela Segovia
There is a pause in my speech,
I stare blankly at the face of my parents who
wait for me to finish the sentence I’ve just begun.
My mouth tightens into a thin line,
It just happened again.
The terror in my mind, knowing I forgot again.
It’s been 17 days
Since I last called my grandfather,
You would think the fact he’s 5,000 miles away
Would ingrain the thought of checking up
But no, it doesn’t, I don’t,
Because I forgot again.
Being an immigrant is a pill bottle
That doesn’t state all the possible side effects.
It doesn’t tell you that you’ll soon forget your native tongue
Forget to check on the people you grew up with
That the places you spent your childhood in,
Will become a distant echo.
I am afraid I am losing my sense of self
Every halt of my words any time
I can’t translate something to my father
Tugs at my throat, it claws at my skin
Like an itch you can’t quite scratch, you can’t quite get rid of.
A burden that rests on your shoulders,
That unceasing weight,
Until the inevitable, overbearing guilt
Drowns your thinking.
I run down the streets of memory lane
I am rushing, racing away from the void
Grabbing at my legs, dragging me down
The hard, cold, floor.
I try to escape, I try to breathe
But, I can’t.
My dialect is poisoned by western slang
Nights where sleep simply won’t visit.
Reminiscing on bygone days
In the land I called my home.
I can’t quite remember the color of my house,
Or the name of my soft spoken neighbor,
A puzzle that’s missing some pieces
Ones that aren’t as important,
But my brain will prick because
It doesn’t look pleasing,
Because it’s missing puzzle pieces,
I am missing puzzle pieces.
Tangled in a different life
Desperately trying to keep a balance in this new world
To the point I am leaving everything I knew behind
A porcelain vase, its patterns full of stories
Discarded, covered in the thick dust of time
So fragile it shatters with a gust of wind
Cutting the skin of my trembling fingers,
The crimson color of the blooming blood,
Tainting the pale of my body.
The same way my brain is tainted by this foreign reality.
It’s an overwhelming possibility
The horror that is the sense of identity
Slowly fading away, far from my reach
Hands so desperately trying to grasp what once was mine
I don’t want my background to just be something
I fill in a form with questions about myself.
A category out of many, a fleeting fact
that won’t matter at the end of the day.
I hope the rest of me
doesn’t get lost in translation, too