he wraps me in his arms for the first time in all my 19 years, his calloused hand brushes against mine while he tells me how excited he is to finally see me. today is the first time we have ever met.
the warmth of a family comes in the form of welcoming someone he has never seen home to a special homecooked meal that took 5 hours to prepare, filling my bowl over and over again until my stomach is crying and I force myself to be firm in saying that I don’t want any more food. tea? he asks, and I consent to tea. i feel pregnant with food and love.
he shows me pictures of my grandparents and my great-grandparents. my grandmother was incredibly pretty when she was young. she’d be suitable as a runway model, but she spent her entire life taking care of her children and her all too many siblings, day in day out of labour and keeping painful secrets to herself. she doesn’t smile much, but she’s pretty even when she doesn’t smile.
i drift away on the couch and i feel blankets being wrapped around me. i feel the same pair of calloused hands gently caress my forehead. i pretend to be fast asleep even though i am wide awake. i hear him ask my father if i would prefer to sleep on their bed; no, i would rather take the couch, thank you.
there is something about black and white photographs that segregate the people inside them from the rest of us. their world was full of colour but technology was unable to capture the vibrancy of life—reducing them to monochrome memories in the form of small and flimsy photographs. and the fact that most of the people in the photographs are now buried underneath the soil, it feels even more distant, even though it’s only been half a century. my great grandmother has the kindest look i ever know, my great grandfather looks rather stoic. i know that i know nothing, trying to figure out their personalities from a 60 year old photograph. they don’t even know i exist.
i think about how incredibly different my life is now compared to theirs. i don’t live in the same country as them, don’t even hold the same citizenship. i don’t even write in my mother tongue. i love someone from a completely different culture and we have so vastly different mother tongues, that we have difficulty understanding each other’s mother tongue comprehensibly. so we converse in english, which is neither of our mother tongues, but the language that we are both the best in.
i often get asked by my relatives how good my mother tongue is, and unfortunately my mother tongue is not my strongest language. but i would like to say that i’m decent, and that the locals here probably can’t tell that i am brought up in another country with a completely different culture unless they dwell beyond standard conversational topics. and that’s okay, i guess. i don’t want to be a culture erosion to my family, i hope i am not.
i get home and text you, and you remind me you love me. and somehow i know that even though our roots are nowhere near the same, love is universal and that’s okay.
; 