Notes to a Lost Mother Tongue
You only come back when I lie.
Yesterday, the refugee child at the intake desk. Seven years old, maybe eight. Speaking our language—yours and mine. Perfect grammar. Better than mine ever was. She asked if I could help her find her grandmother.
"Yes," I said in English. "Someone will help you."
She waited. Then asked again in our language—could I help her.
I opened my mouth to answer in English again, but she interrupted: "I know you understand me. You're listening with your whole body."
She was right. My shoulders had lifted at grandmother—baba—the way yours taught me. My hands had turned palm-up at her questioning tone, the gesture you make for "where."
So I lied.
"I don't speak that language," I said in English.
And suddenly you were there. In my mouth. Complete sentences. Perfect tenses. Flowing like water.
"But you just—" the child started.
"I don't speak it," I continued in our language, the lie making me fluent. "I've never spoken it. I don't know why you think I understand you."
The words came so easily. Subject, verb, object all correct. The formal address for elders, the tender diminutive for children. All of it perfect, as long as I was lying.
The child tilted her head. Smiled. Like she understood the game.
"Then can you not-tell my grandmother that I'm here? Can you not-translate that she needs to come get me?"
"I cannot do that," I said, meaning I could. Would. "Because I absolutely don't speak this language."
We went on like this. The child asking for help in the negative. Me denying in the affirmative. A grammar of refusal that meant its opposite. You flowing through me, easy as breathing, as long as nothing I said was true.
Her grandmother arrived twenty minutes later because I "couldn't" call her, "didn't" know the words to explain.
After they left, I tried to thank my supervisor in our language—she's from the same region, though younger. Just a simple, honest thank you.
Nothing came. Mouth empty as a pot.
That night I called my mother and told her, in you, that I was happy, successful, whole. You poured out of me, fluid and perfect.
Then she asked if I was okay, really okay.
The line went silent.
When I dream now, I tell myself elaborate lies in your voice: I never left. I still live there. The war didn't happen. Everyone survived.
You let me narrate whole impossible worlds, as long as they're not true.
This morning I tried to write one honest sentence in you. Just one. "I am—"
Nothing.
But I can write this: I am not lost. I have not been translating other people's tragedies for so long that I've forgotten my own. I do not wake up speaking English to the mirror. I am not writing this in the language that replaced you.
See how easily you come when I lie?
The child knew. Children always know. She gave me the only gift she could: a reason to pretend.
I don't miss you. That's the only truth I can say in you now. I don't miss you at all.
