The White Book

The box holding their mother’s powdered bones they enshrined in an ossuary;

My twenty-two-year-old mother crawled into the kitchen and boiled some water to sterilize a pair of scissors.

If silence could be condensed into the smallest, most solid object, this is how it would feel, she
thought.

Person to whom the cure of this crying is as yet unknown.

Flustered, she takes its swaddled self into her arms.

I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life.

ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound.

ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound.

Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die.

At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life I have lived and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable.