The Language of Exile

The wind whispers in a language I do not know, though it should be mine. It carries scents that make my stomach twist with longing and revulsion. I stand on Chilean soil, where the land should cradle me like a child, but instead, it recoils. The dirt beneath my feet is both familiar and foreign, like a forgotten lullaby half-remembered in dreams. The syllables of my mother tongue twist in my mouth like thorns; the accent is mine, yet it disgusts me. It carries echoes of a home that never felt like home, of a history I want to erase, of a cycle I want to break.

My mother’s voice rings in my ears- softer in Uruguay, where she let herself breathe, where she sacrificed for me, where I saw the version of her I wanted to become. Uruguay was a place of dreams, of a past she wished had been hers. I watched her as a child watches the sun- always reaching, always burning, never quite able to touch. I wanted to be like her, but the people there reminded me, again and again, that I was not from there. Their words built invisible walls around me, barriers made of unspoken rules I did not understand.

Then the great ocean swallowed us whole, spitting us out into the United States, piece by piece, city by city- Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts. Each place a different language, a different face, a different version of myself I had to build from the bones of the last. I was a child with no words, only hands, only pictures, only desperate attempts to reach out and make friends before I learned the music of English. And when I did learn, the words came with weight.

Hispanic. Latina. Words meant to categorize me, to define me before I had the chance to define myself. I was more than those words, and yet, I clung to them because they were the only ones I had. But when they asked, “Where are you from?”- that was when the rage curled hot in my chest. What answer could I give that would satisfy them? I was born in one place, raised in another, moved to another before I could even count my age on my fingers. What is a home that never settles? What is a root when the soil changes beneath you before you can even grow?

I envied those who could name their place with certainty, who could point to a town, a house, a tree in a yard and say, “This is where I belong.” I carried my home in pieces, scattered across memories, across accents, across the flavors of my mother’s food and the English in my mouth. I carried it in Spanglish, the only tongue that felt right, the only way I could let my emotions spill out naturally. Spanish was too raw, too filled with ghosts. English was too distant, too foreign, too full of jagged edges. But in Spanglish, I could exist- half here, half there, always in between.

My body betrayed me, too. My skin was pale, my race labeled white, but my features did not let me blend. The dark hair on my arms, on my body, on my skin marked me as different. I remember the shame, a razor slicing away what made me me, wishing I could be light-haired, small, American. I wanted to erase myself, to smooth the rough edges of my existence, to belong somewhere fully instead of always being too much or not enough.

But in the in-between, in the space where I did not fit, I found the echoes of others like me. We were ghosts drifting through cultures, slipping between languages, piecing together identities like mosaics from broken glass. We were born of displacement, raised by contradiction, shaped by absence. We were questions with no answers, wanderers with no maps, always moving, always searching, never quite arriving.

And so, I ask - who am I? What am I? Where am I? How am I? Why am I? The questions swirl in the air, twisting into the wind that never answers, that only carries me forward, to another place, another language, another version of myself. The land beneath me is not mine, but perhaps I am of the land, no matter how far I go. Perhaps belonging is not in a place, but in the spaces between, in the echoes of voices carried across oceans, in the words spoken in laughter and tears, in the stories we tell to keep ourselves from vanishing.

Perhaps I will always be too much, never enough. But perhaps, in the space between too much and not enough, I will finally find the shape of myself.