Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

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

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