I’m Not From Here
Fiction Friday
There’s a tadpole that ventures into the pool by night only to be scooped out with a net skimmer by morning.
Under the moonlight, its breaststrokes are expansive, pointing to the belief that the pool has no edge. In its ignorance, it embraces a freedom others would call a prison. And in its content unknowing of another day, it lives a limitless life.
The tadpole does not need to claim the territory as its own, for belonging does not exist in its world. As such, it knows nothing of what it feels like not to be from somewhere.
The pool is as real as a pond. The water is the same, or seemingly the same, within either.
But when the cold dries out my skin and crackles the peach-silk of my lips, I yearn to be somewhere that no longer exists. The motherland which cradled me in its arms no longer recognizes me as her own, and nor do I identify with her selfish whims anymore.
We’ve drifted apart, oceans between enlarging day after day as the ice melts and our contempt and disappointment for each other grows.
The tadpole belongs to her. But the best memories of her, belong to me.
Yet, here I am; a displaced body, a figurative identity, a mismatched nationality — titles, names and adjectives failing every other second to describe the where and the what and the who of my being, incessantly trying to scoop me out of the pool I have made for myself, where — like the tadpole — the taxonomy of life does not matter.
