4.7.26

The things I could have said and the things I said after all. The other day, I spoke of language as more than a tool, but as possession. You use a language for long enough, and it begins to possess you. I wanted to stop right there as if there was a poison in my mouth. We are born without knowing what a map is, but slowly we learn. This sound is mother, that sound is father. The sound of traffic or flowing water means stop. A strange man in a car means turn the other way. Our weeping mother in a car means an evening of silence or rage. Our country is where the land on which we work, but also somewhere else, somewhere far away, maybe in memory. When we returned to the country we left, everything was both bigger and smaller than we left it. The map must have gotten it wrong. There's still suffering here. We were trying to get to love, but its place on the map is crossed out in ink.