Roots Without Soil

Roots Without Soil I. I keep my mother's spoon in my suitcase— silver worn thin from stirring cardamom tea, its handle curved like her thumb pressing into my palm those last mornings. Now I stir instant coffee with plastic, the bitter dust settling like ash from stations where no train returns. II. The grocery clerk asks for my name twice. I spell it slowly, letter by letter, my grandmother's lullaby becomes a grocery list in foreign syllables that cut sharp against teeth never meant to hold my name. III. At the laundromat, I fold my father's shirt—still blue, still holding the shape of his shoulders. The woman beside me whispers mi amor to her daughter. I swallow the Persian words I want to say to no one, feel them burn like gravel in my throat, unspoken. IV. Here, trees grow straight and silent, never bent by desert wind. Back home, jasmine vines strangled fence posts in their hunger, roots so desperate they cracked concrete, split foundation stones just to taste water again. V. I practice the algebra of forgetting: subtract the call to prayer at dawn, divide the taste of dates by distance, multiply silence by the weight of unsaid words. But my dreams still count in Persian, and I wake with my first language thick as date syrup on a tongue that claims forgetfulness. VI. Tonight, my hands still brown from the sun I left behind, I plant mint in a coffee can, its leaves curled like my mother's fingers when she counted prayer beads. I whisper in the language I'm learning to bury: "Grow stubborn. Grow wild. Teach this foreign dirt that we were never meant to be tame." The first green shoot breaks through soil like a promise I'm finally ready to keep.