Text by Iris Király
Tegning av Silvía Sif Ólafsdóttir
Sometimes, I forget the taste of my first words:
how Romanian once carried the scent of wet soil
and sweet summer fruit.
Now, Norwegian sits in my mouth:
clean, deliberate, like a river I have learned
to swim in, but never float through.
English has become my liminal space:
the one that stitches my silences at the in-between,
my first half-finished home.
People say I speak beautifully,
that in my suspension-seeking agency
and borrowed rhythms,
I have almost learned the shape of belonging.
But they do not see the displacement
that sits beneath each sentence: translated, artificial, rehearsed.
They do not know how I mourn the melody
of fragmented words that no longer arrive
when I call them out loud.
But I do.
I feel my ego dissolving:
dandelion seeds scattered in the wind,
longing to remember the wishes
the child in me once pressed between my palms,
still pounding like another
neuroplastic lullaby
in my aching brain.
