Person to person. A feeling that can’t be translated. What gets lost. They don’t describe enough the long fear of it. When younger I’d say the thing I was most scared of was being misunderstood. That must’ve remained with me, my anxious occlusions between my friends turning into not my friends, and my foreign positioning to regular human speech. Here I am too rude. There a thick stone of yam or fruit lodges into my body, catching and catching onto my voice. I want to say it but I don’t know if I have the words. Sometimes I dear there are no words for it, not in any language, and this emotion soldered to the blood orange rimefrost of my tongue will never leave me, will never release. My foreign position to regular humanity. The question not asked of me, but one that I ask: HOW DO YOU SAY?

But I’m not bilingual, not above it or some middle thing but instead completely off the number line. The ways I know Bahasa Indonesia but can’t speak it, and I can recite Arabic but not understand it, and now I’ve invested most of myself to the forlorn rigmarole and tick-swollen stupor of English, new poet, emerging writer, a conversationalist hopeful. Oh god. I don’t describe enough the terror, the long fear of it. I regret leaving so early, and I regret forgetting. My parents too busy learning English themselves to teach me something I thought I could own, but in the petaled casket of air what I thought was my language threatens to leave, always. I know, I know.

Is this good enough? At iftar parties they speak to me in English first. I’m only receptive fluent. I hate myself for my lack even under the assurance that fluency is a lifetime-length. Sometimes I wish I had someone to blame but it’s the same mode of me accepting my figurative or potentially literal homelessness, both entries you might not have even seen yet. Sometimes I think I’m being westernized, and I guess I should learn to be okay with that. Another tragedy, another conflicting loyalty. Translation is another word for movement, and I don't know what that means for me. This is the fifth torture evolving after the fourth, taking the idea that all knowledge is inherently fragmented and now realizing that that occurs when expressing knowledge too.

>Wanting to express myself but not who I am. Wanting to be understood but fearing it’s impossible. A torture is is something that won’t stop. I say it to believe that I can say it.