Everything

I rode the train this morning, squeezed between the yammering conversation of two women and the blur of landscape colors rushing past the window. Their native tongue a key I earned not long ago, my own enigma code. Still, I bob in the dark sea. Then — a silver fish breaks the surface: someone speaking my other tongue. I turn. Not someone I know — but a face shaped by a long lost great-grandmother we may have shared. Two conversations, two rivers flowing beside me. Neither one

On one side, my mouth opens ready to shout On the other, it's shut, biting it's tongue. Torn by desire crushed under obligation how does one find love a superficial angel on one side and a judgemental devil on the other It's a disease I told myself If one side smiles long enough, or the other side folds I can almost blend in. Fitting in, until I had to speak. Then the farce that I was well fell down. One side shouts a guttural moan the other whispers regurgitated data. "W

Our dishwasher recently got grimey, so I went back to handwashing dishes. It’s not something I’ve done in years. Before I moved to Denmark, my family never used the dishwasher. In fact, ours wasn’t even a dishwasher — it was a storage unit  for things that had no home. Plastic forks. Cups. Random kitchen tools. My mother used to say, “It’s a waste of water.” So we washed everything by hand — bowls, chopsticks, pots — and I grew up believing dishwashers were just foreign devic