By ELLA LIN
I miss lemons. I miss sun-baked milk. I miss heat.
I miss the melted wads of spit and honey
drying on rain-rusted brick
the chipped bits of baby bamboo
roaming through golden water.
To arrive, wordless
yearning for a native hum
a taste of bordering lips
I did not know I would miss.
The long hours between Beijing and San Francisco legs making manic circles
occasionally I stand furious
while waiting to land, brushing phantom
pain from homesick knees
looking down at the lost road,
where asphalt and uprooted bodies meet.
Sanitized skin slips
hesitant hands hiding some foreign tongue
deep in the underbelly of the bird-plane
the flight attendant droning
her wings tired from moving
and never returning home.
I wish I could go back, I tell her.
This water exits
my body flowing
dying in the unending river
and I can do nothing
but watch it leave.
Playground painted red-blue. A dry patch of grass. Fenced-in limbs. I’m scared. I’m scared of the squirrels.
I’m scared of the other kids. I’m scared of this face that does not remember
how to speak
which way my body faces
where I hid all these things.
The worst feeling of arrival
is being unable to say what is yours.
Lost. Disconfigured limbs. I dream of gaps
between tongues, watching stars
form constellations in the dead night
their bodies listless, floating in search of home
waiting to fall all the way back down to earth.
The space between my hands and my arms feels disjoint: watery, expendable like I could tear my eyes away from the rest of my flesh
and it would not hurt
to feel the distance.
I was, without doubt
born into a body
a thing-speaking body
a body that did not want these bodies
this tongue so bittersweet
this head that did not remember
the coming
the going
the gaps spanning these hands and arms and feet.
I dream of missing. The hurt. The wanting. The irrevocable distance between. I dream until my body aches all over again.
Writer | Ella Lin ’27 | elin27@amherst.edu
Editor | Kei Lim ’25 | nlim25@amherst.edu