Neither Here nor There
どこにも属さない
After nine years away, Amara finally returned to the country she had once called home.
Neither the streets she remembered nor the people she had loved were quite as before.
Nowhere in the old town did she feel the simple she had expected to find.
Her had shifted, and neighbours now heard the north humming beneath her words.
She had become, to them, neither fully a daughter of the town nor quite a stranger.
Cousins asked about the north as if she had returned from another, colder planet.
Never had she imagined that home itself could make her feel so quietly .
The market smelled the same, yet she reached for coins of the wrong country by habit.
Neither language felt wholly hers now; each carried a faint of the other.
At her mother's table, old words returned to her tongue, warm but slightly loosened.
Rarely did a sentence come out without a small, pause in the middle.
Her mother watched her carefully, saying neither nor welcome too loudly.
Only later did Amara understand that her mother, too, had learned to wait and read.
Neither in the north nor in the south was there a place that asked nothing of her.
Everywhere she went, she carried a small, invisible form of .
Walking the old , she felt both entirely at home and entirely apart.
Never before had she held two such feelings so calmly at the same time.
Perhaps was not a country at all, but something one carried within.
Neither staying nor leaving would ever fully answer the question of where she was from.
She began to see that the ache might never close, and that this was .
Her old friends had lives now that continued without a space shaped like her.
Rarely, though, did she feel ; mostly she felt the strange calm of .
She stayed two weeks, then packed for the north, no longer sure which way was back.
At the station her mother held her, saying, in the old tongue, simply: come again.
Neither wholly leaving nor wholly arriving, Amara boarded the train once more.
Between two homes, she realised, was itself a place, and she had learned to live there.