Generations in Transit

I've brought some sweaters. A toothbrush. Everything

else is borrowed or where I left it, unearthed

from months of limbo. Here, the days are slow. The moon

is forgiving. I walk past paddy fields where

blooming rice hugs my bare feet, learn to unwrap

sticky porridge from coconut leaves. They say

taste buds only live for two weeks, but that was before

I tasted the eternal language of home. Before

I knew love could translate through mangoes picked

straight from the garden tree or motorcycle rides

to wet markets, bodies pressed between

humidity. The village hums of a Javan tongue

I understand but cannot speak. My parents reassemble

dialect into memory as if they never left

twenty years ago, and among the street vendors

I test the words for

thank you

. Tonight, I will

sleep in my mother's old bunk bed, the one

that still creaks on the second step. I will wonder

if she once lay the same way-one hand grazing

the notched wood, the other holding

her heart. The future too blurry to see. In

different timelines, we were both

once girls.