There may come a moment when you realize you’re losing grip on something that makes you fundamentally you; when the fear of forgetting something dear eventually catches up, as you watch that piece of your identity slip through your fingers and into the void.

There’s an ache that spreads each time I’m confronted with a now unfamiliar familiarity. In the mirror, I see only what has become a fading image of what must have been myself in a past life. A distant memory. And then the shame creeps in — the thought that those who taught you everything you know, or knew, would be shattered to witness the riches you have unwillingly abandoned. Have I betrayed my own roots and withheld their nourishment? I would like to return. To consume my language and to be wholly, unapologetically consumed by it.

These last few years of my life here, I have seen all the ways in which I have evolved, and yet when I return home, I am reminded only of what I seem to have lost; what I could be relied upon to produce and had most pride in — the ability to write effortlessly in a script that extends into the millennia before us.

I am no longer surrounded by my native tongue. The subtle intonations that ebb and flow, the way my dialect causes the “γ”, “π”, “α” to leave the lips. The delicacy in its use, like a honey-laced Muse’s song, every word weaved with the next as if golden thread on Penelope’s loom. But just as that has been undone, so have I. 

Now my tongue has been rendered dry with longing to speak what I once harnessed with such precision and clarity. I am paralyzed at the attempt to convey an idea with the same ease my 17-year-old self was able to. “My mouth is a desert of guilt,” said Aman K. Batt. I wish to once again ride the rolling Mediterranean waves that are my sentences and build sand palaces out of stories of community. To have my paragraphs flow like the Zephyr’s summer breeze and share words as warm as the rosy-fingered dawn.

Maybe the sun hasn’t set on me just yet.