Generations in Transit
I’ve brought some sweaters. A toothbrush. Everything
else is borrowed or where I left it, unearthed
from months of limbo. Here, the days are slow. The moon
is forgiving. I walk past paddy fields where
blooming rice hugs my bare feet, learn to unwrap
sticky porridge from coconut leaves. They say
taste buds only live for two weeks, but that was before
I tasted the eternal language of home. Before
I knew love could translate through mangoes picked
straight from the garden tree or motorcycle rides
to wet markets, bodies pressed between
humidity. The village hums of a Javan tongue
I understand but cannot speak. My parents reassemble
dialect into memory as if they never left
twenty years ago, and among the street vendors
I test the words for thank you. Tonight, I will
sleep in my mother’s old bunk bed, the one
that still creaks on the second step. I will wonder
if she once lay the same way—one hand grazing
the notched wood, the other holding
her heart. The future too blurry to see. In
different timelines, we were both
once girls.
else is borrowed or where I left it, unearthed
from months of limbo. Here, the days are slow. The moon
is forgiving. I walk past paddy fields where
blooming rice hugs my bare feet, learn to unwrap
sticky porridge from coconut leaves. They say
taste buds only live for two weeks, but that was before
I tasted the eternal language of home. Before
I knew love could translate through mangoes picked
straight from the garden tree or motorcycle rides
to wet markets, bodies pressed between
humidity. The village hums of a Javan tongue
I understand but cannot speak. My parents reassemble
dialect into memory as if they never left
twenty years ago, and among the street vendors
I test the words for thank you. Tonight, I will
sleep in my mother’s old bunk bed, the one
that still creaks on the second step. I will wonder
if she once lay the same way—one hand grazing
the notched wood, the other holding
her heart. The future too blurry to see. In
different timelines, we were both
once girls.
March 2025
Tiffany Aurelia is a South-East-Asian writer and student from Indonesia. She has won runner-up of The Kenyon Review's Patricia Grodd Prize and the Woorila Louis Rockne Prize. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Diode, Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Shore, and elsewhere. She loves ocean swims and strawberry matcha.
Art: Claire Tang, Pushing Up Daisies. Oil on canvas.