A Letter in My Mother Tongue
母語で書いた手紙
A thin arrived from home, its handwriting older and more trembling than before.
It was her mother's hand, , that pressed each letter deep into the page.
Holding the letter to the light, Amara felt the years fold suddenly shut between them.
It was in the mother tongue that every line was written, warm, plain, and .
Her daughter, curious, asked her to read the strange letters on the page aloud.
Sitting the girl on her lap, Amara began slowly to translate her mother's words.
It was not the meaning but the music of the sentences that refused to cross over.
Reading aloud, she paused often, searching for words that simply did not exist here.
Each translation arrived correct but lighter, as if something had leaked out on the way.
It was the small things her mother wrote of that pierced her most without warning.
The garden, the neighbour's dog, the bread that still cooled on the same .
Translating these, she heard her own voice thin, unable to carry their full weight.
Her daughter listened, , sensing feeling in a language she could not follow.
It was the silence between the lines, more than the words, that spoke the loudest.
Folding the page carefully, Amara realised how much a letter can and cannot carry.
Her mother had asked, at the end, whether the grandchild had learned any of home.
It was that single question that Amara could not bring herself to answer honestly.
Choosing her words gently, she told the girl a simpler, kinder version instead.
It was love, not , that guided the small lies she told that evening.
The girl asked to keep the letter, drawn to its strange and beautiful shapes.
Surprised and moved, Amara pinned it above the child's small wooden desk.
It was there, perhaps, that a first back to home quietly began to form.
That night she wrote a reply, choosing every word as if placing stones in a river.
It was not fluency her mother wanted, she knew, but the sound of her living voice.
Sealing the , she pressed her thumb to it as if sending part of herself.
It was the mother tongue, after all, that still carried her most heart.