Chapter 02 · 3 min 33 sec
Exile Body
The hollowness of achievement when it costs us the people we love.
Lyrics· 276 words
[Verse 1] I wake up here again in this borrowed skin My ribs know the route my mouth learned to live with
A name in the pocket worn thin at the fold I touch every scar line like map ink in gold
[Pre-Chorus] Every border I crossed is still under my hands Every door I survived left a mark where I stand
[Chorus] My body, my country my body, my country I carry the lost home like a bone in my sleeve
My body, my country my body, my country If exile comes looking it finds me here, still breathing
[Verse 2] The old rooms are vanished the keys gone cold But my heart keeps a census of every street I sold
I sleep with the ruins behind my eyes And wake with the language that keeps me alive
[Pre-Chorus] Every border I crossed is still under my hands Every door I survived left a mark where I stand
[Chorus] My body, my country my body, my country I carry the lost home like a bone in my sleeve
My body, my country my body, my country If exile comes looking it finds me here, still breathing
[Bridge] And if there’s no return then let this be true I was made from the leaving but I stayed with you
No flag in the window no soil I can claim Just this scarred little kingdom that answers my name
[Chorus] My body, my country my body, my country I carry the lost home like a bone in my sleeve
My body, my country my body, my country If exile comes looking it finds me here, still breathing
Short Story
*The body keeps the address the mind has already forwarded.*
Mara had moved from Lisbon to Rotterdam in October, which is the worst month to move anywhere, but especially to a city where the rain falls sideways and the light gives up before dinner. She was thirteen and a half, which her mother said was practically fourteen, but Mara knew the half mattered. She had been given a new bedroom with a window that looked out onto a canal, and she had been told, by everyone who loved her, that this was exciting. She practiced believing them.
By February she had stopped thinking about Lisbon constantly. She had a friend named Sofie who laughed too loudly and shared her lunch without being asked, and Mara had learned enough Dutch to understand most things, which is different from understanding everything but is still something. She thought, on most days, that she was fine. She told her grandmother this on the phone, and her grandmother said *boa* in that low voice, and Mara held the phone very close to her ear and stayed quiet for a moment longer than necessary.
Then one Sunday her mother made *arroz de frango* — just chicken and rice, the kind of ordinary meal that nobody would ever write a poem about — and the steam from the pot rose up in the kitchen and Mara was suddenly seven years old and standing on the tiles in Benfica with wet hair from the bath. She had not thought about those tiles in four months. She had not known she was still carrying them. She sat down at the kitchen table and cried in a way she hadn't since October, except now it was not sadness exactly. It was more like recognition. Like her body had been holding something in its hands this whole time, carefully, and had only just allowed itself to look.
Her mother came and sat beside her without asking why, which is the highest form of understanding. They ate together while the rain hit the window at its particular Rotterdam angle, and Mara noticed — really noticed — that this rain sounded different from the rain she grew up inside. Not worse. Not better. Just different. A different conversation the sky was having with the roof. She thought: *I know two rains now.* She did not know why that felt like something to hold onto, but it did.
She called her grandmother again that evening, later than usual. She described the arroz, the steam, the tiles she'd suddenly remembered. Her grandmother laughed and said that she still sometimes smelled the sea in her own kitchen, and she had lived inland for forty years. *The body,* she said, *is very loyal.* Mara looked at the canal from her window. The water moved. It was going somewhere.
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*Home is not a place that stays still — it is a scent, a sound, a pair of wet feet on old tiles, and the body carries it faithfully across every ocean you ask it to cross.*
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