Work Text:
Irina
She is speaking again—
or maybe it’s only memory
wearing her voice like a coat I never outgrew.
Soft, musical, almost amused,
as if the world has always made sense to her
in a way it never did to me.
I try to answer,
but the years between us are water.
My words sink before they reach her.
I want to ask about before—
before kitchens went quiet,
before the air in our home turned to glass,
before I learned how to hold my breath
for whole seasons at a time.
Tell me every place you ever stood, Mama.
Tell me if the sky looked different
in the life where you stayed.
I was twelve
when the ocean came into the house.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just a door closed
and a tide that never went back out.
They said accident.
My father said it with a jaw like stone.
I said it because sons learn early
which truths are survivable
and which ones drown the room.
So I folded the real word small—
small enough to hide behind my teeth.
Carried it there for years
like a shard of winter
that would not melt.
You kept talking in my head, though.
Your voice a shoreline I walked at night,
pretending I wasn’t lost.
Sometimes it was so gentle
I could almost believe
nothing terrible had ever happened—
that I had not mistaken the sound
of something breaking
for the sound of waves.
I imagine now I am strong enough
to drive you beneath afternoon trees,
roots knotted deep under the road,
holding hands in the dark where no one looks.
I would not try to define love for you.
I would just point—
to the shadows between wildflowers,
to the quiet work of unseen things
keeping the earth from coming apart.
Your silence shaped me
the way water shapes stone—
slow, relentless,
polishing the outside
while hollowing the center.
People think I am made of lightness,
of jokes tossed like pebbles across a rink.
They don’t see the undertow.
They don’t hear the old world
still moving under everything I say.
But I am learning the tide does not only take.
Sometimes it returns
with strange gifts in its hands.
I find boys like the one I was—
shoulders tight, smiles practiced,
carrying oceans in their chests
with no language for the weather.
I tell them nothing heroic.
Only: You are not wrong for feeling the weight.
Only: You don’t have to lie forever.
This is how I speak to you now, Mama—
through open doors,
through money given quietly,
through rooms where no one has to pretend
the storm was only rain.
I stop you, sometimes, in my mind.
I say the truth the child could not.
Mother,
I say,
you didn’t slip.
You were tired of drowning.
The sea inside me still moves,
but it no longer tries to drag me under.
It carries your voice instead—
not as a riddle,
not as a wound,
but as a current
pulling me, gently,
toward the living.