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the foreign daughter
language which is foreign to
us and internalised it as I have
to the point that it is the main
language she thinks in, is only
kind of person I could speak
to as I sometimes speak to
myself, scrambling the two
languages. And although I’d
known how to speak to the
locals for years without any
problems, I suddenly realised
that in the city where I was
going to live now, where I
wanted to be myself and not
need to explain who I was,
very probably nobody would
understand me. For that
reason alone, for a ridiculous
thought that had come into
my head, that I didn’t try out
on anyone, I decided to get
off the train, change platform
and wait for the next one. To
return home, I told myself,
which inmymother’s language
also means to die.
If I thought about A. I’d
immediately feel a dull pain
in my chest, a heavy weight
pressing on my thorax, one
that made me feel small and
shrank me by the minute. I’d
often think about him simply
to hurt myself and curb any
desire I might harbour to do
the first thing that came to
me, whatever took my fancy.
I’d opened myself wide to
him, I’d split myself open
in his presence. In images
it was as if the skin down
the middle of my body had
always been pulled taut, in an
imaginary, unbroken line from
my forehead to my vagina, a
line, like the river close to my
grandparents’ house, that
surfaced at certain points, as
it was doing now, from my
navel to the bottom of my
belly where I can trace its
tremulous, bright chestnut
brown. It is the same line
our women (our? Are you