Mom and I were driving down the road. We drive together often and although years apart in age, and different in too many ways, there is one thing that always connects us back together. There is one thing we share and that is how we got to where we are today. “How did I get here?!” I asked, laughing, “can you believe I’m graduating already?!”
and she said, “when you came here you were only in the sixth grade.”
“That was a difficult time…I don’t wanna remember it…” I said.
She didn’t want to remember it either. Neither of us wanted to go back to the memory of that unfamiliar, empty apartment that we had to sleep in every night. Neither of us wanted to remember the walls that we couldn’t break, the rooms that we didn’t want to unpack in.
“Is it going to happen again? Will there be more of those times?” I ask, more for myself than for her.
She said the hardest part was not knowing the language. Language is the basis for staring a life in any country.
But was it more than language? Would it have been easier if I were older?
Mom kept driving. We didn’t talk about it anymore. We passed through the traffic just like we’d done six years ago.