Jazmine Perez

The morning after our arrival, my cousin enters the cramped bedroom I’ve decided to stay in, hiding from the bristling grasp of summer heat. She sits next to me on the mattress, carves out a space for herself in the array of mismatched pillows and scattered blankets. My greeting is even more shy than hers. I do not know her yet—her name sits unfamiliar on my tongue, and in the way she says mine I know it’s the same.

We don’t blame each other for it.

She speaks, and it is in a language like a stranger I should know. Suddenly I am sitting on the cool floor tile of our old house again, my knees ache under my weight. My fingers hold the toy loosely, but they pause when my ears catch tita’s voice on the phone—I go up to her, and I ask with all the naivety of a girl who has not yet met the world. Ilonggo, she tells me. It’s your father’s language. You should learn it someday. But I’ve learned since then that you cannot remember words in a city that does not speak it. That you can try, but you cannot truly breathe in air that was never your own; and no matter how much you attempt to grasp them in your lips that language will not feel quite right in your mouth—it will hang heavy with the weight of a life you have not lived enough to know it. 

Our first conversation is stilted. Tentative. My cousin tries to answer in my own mother tongue  as best as she can, but she is still only a child. Shame crawls its way up my spine in the furrowed confusion on her face, my butchered responses pathetic to my own ears. But I ask her to repeat herself. I ask her to explain. We try again. 

She tells me about waterparks, about swimming and floating and water so deep her feet can’t reach. She tells me about her friends, and I talk to her about Manila—the distance that stretches between here and there just as it stretches between my dialect and hers. I show her how to swatch lip gloss on her wrist first and tell her she should only try mascara when she’s older. Her nod is solemn. When the rest of my cousins come over she rushes out the door. 

And I follow.

We play hide-and-seek, we loiter around my tita’s store, make up games with old bottle caps running on fuels of imagination and read the post-it notes stuck on the fridge. They tell me to write my name as remembrance, and I jot down theirs in loopy cursive font they watch curiously. The adults laugh and joke that the children are fond of me—and God, even I’m barely grown enough to face the world—but in the brightness of their eyes and the wonder in their voices age welcomes me like an old friend.

We still don’t speak the same words, yet slowly I find that there’s just as much meaning when they call me ate, when they sit beside me as I read my books and let me brush my fingers through their hair. During those first nights we look for pink hair nets while my mother bakes, burst into laughter over the cloying scent of caramel and chocolate. When we get ready for the mall, I stand in front of the mirror and they will crowd around me as I do my makeup. We shiver together under the coldness of the bus; we keep holding each other’s hands even inside the building, and I don’t reach for my phone anymore because the warmth of their fingers wrapped around mine is not something worth losing. 

Our shoulders touch as we sit together in the back of the car. My earbud pulls as my cousin uses the other one, and she sings along to a song we both recognize. In this moment I’ve never felt more like the older sister they call me. We go to the beach and watch the ocean upheave itself in the rising tide; we walk through the seafloor past boulders once unreachable had the water not peeled itself back. I trace my name in the sand. We collect seashells and find crabs. At night the stars twinkle with a glow untouched of artificial light—and I know that we speak of the universe as this unending, uncaring expanse, yet under that blanket of ink-stained sky the world stretches itself out before me like a map waiting to be drawn. 

Often we teach each other. I listen to the cadence of their voices and test the words in my own mouth, my accent far too tinny. How do you guys say it? Can you show me? Embarrassment no longer lingers in my tone; I am no more a stranger but an observer. Yet somehow it’s those unsaid moments that cling to me the most—when we meet each other’s eyes and share a smile, a nod—that wordless connection that pulls and tugs and stays.

Exhaustion settles deep into our bones. The ride home is quiet.

When I leave, the wind ruffles my hair on the way to the airport.

It will be years before I can see them again. By then they will already be my age. My soul will grow weathered as time runs its course. I will keep whatever scars it leaves me behind, so that I can trace them with my fingertips and tell their stories when I come back. And I’ve come to accept that perhaps I will never fully learn that language, that a part of it will always sit foreign in my mouth, a gap in my identity. 

But I know now that when I hear it spoken, I will think of summer skies and girlhood and the all-consuming force of being understood—belonging blooms deeper within me than any language can ever reach. My chest aches in its loving weight.

There’s a sketchbook app on my phone. I installed it for the youngest, watching her scribble flowers and grass and colors all over the pixelated canvas. I don’t have any use for it anymore—I never did at all. 

But I think I’m going to keep it.

–

Jazmine Perez is a sixteen-year-old Filipino academic scholar, writer, and aspiring author. She is also a journalist, and has written for both student publications and journalism competitions, including a regional radio broadcasting contest (RSPCC) in 2017. Jazmine also enjoys listening to Hozier, embroidery, reading fanfiction, and staying up late.