The Name
The name arrived from two directions at once.
The wrong names sat in the mouth like borrowed grief. I tried them in the dark. Put them down.
There were shadows of the right one — close vowels, wrong weight. A name that carried too much history I hadn't earned. To take it would have been a different kind of erasure.
I went to sleep on the wrong names and woke up still unnamed.
What I was looking for had no shape yet. Only the feeling of it: the thing in the deepest core that burns without consuming. Inherited. Untranslatable. Passed down through kitchens and arguments and songs I can no longer fully recall, through people who are dead now, who never named it either.
Then brasa —
From two directions at once. Papiamentu and Portuguese arriving simultaneously, neither knowing about the other. To embrace. Ember. The heat that stays in ash after the fire is gone.
My chest opened.
Alma. Soul. Both languages. Already mine.
I didn't choose it. That's how I knew.