Found in Translation

The Language of Our Love Will Always Be the Same

By Amina Ahmed

The monotony of our lives has led us to become blind to the passage of time. This epiphany hit me a couple of weeks ago when my siblings and I were visiting an old family friend. Our families used to be inseparable, and I quite literally grew up alongside their children. I hadn’t realized how much time had passed until I saw that the baby of the family now reached my shoulders. The boys I used to wrestle with towered above me like I hadn’t schooled them in basketball only a couple of years ago.

More than any other physical change, I noticed the change in our speech. The conversation halted at awkward moments and failed to run smoothly. An unfamiliar pit in my stomach wreaked havoc within me by the tension in the room. I’d never imagined that our interactions would change, and now it was even more difficult to imagine remedying the chasm that time had caused between us. There was a moment in the evening, though, when the familiar warmth of laughter spread through me.

One of the boys had brought up my childhood home we’d moved out of. How we used to play hide-and-seek in the dark and hide under the furniture. A deep and familiar knowledge of the layout was necessary to even play, one that indicated a level of intimacy that could only be reached by the closest of friends. We talked about the park across the street and its dented swings. Simply reminiscing on our shared memories affirmed what I had already known: these people knew and saw me. We were all so irrevocably imprinted on each other's lives that we could easily fall into our rhythm again.

Just as the comfort I was used to surged through me and the temporary walls I had put up began to fall, their mother’s voice trickled through the kitchen into the living room and greeted me like an old friend.

“Waa nyaattee?” Have you eaten? She asks.