Lost in Translation

There are words that live only in my mother’s mouth, feelings that curl up in the corners of consonants I learned before I could walk.

When my heart breaks here I reach for comfort in a language they don’t know—but the English word “sadness” feels thin as paper, while saudade carries oceans, hiraeth holds whole mountains.

I try to explain the ache of missing a place that isn’t quite home, but “homesick” sounds like a simple fever, not this complex grief for something I can’t name.

My friends nod politely when I say I’m “upset,” not knowing that inside me storms a word so specific it describes exactly the particular way your chest caves in when you disappoint your grandmother.

Sometimes I start sentences in one language and finish them in another, my thoughts switching tracks mid-stream, leaving listeners stranded on the platform of half-understanding.

There are jokes that die crossing borders, humor that withers in translation, leaving me laughing alone at something that sounds foolish in this tongue.

At night, I dream in my first language, wake with words dissolving on my lips like sugar in rain, sweetness I can taste but cannot hold.

I am fluent in both, master of neither—forever searching for the perfect word that exists somewhere between two dictionaries, in the untranslatable space where my heart truly speaks.