Foreign Familiar

Foreign (read from top to bottom)

I have learned to answer to a name that arrives half-translated in unfamiliar mouths,

to let it arrive misshaped and still turn when it’s called.

I cannot say

this place feels like home.

I have always known

Colombia is enough, even if

my voice softens here,

even if it no longer carries the same weight it once carried when spoken aloud.

“¿Ya estoy llegando a casa?”

I would be lying to say

I belong.

It would be easier to forget

how my name sounds when pronounced through Romance tongues—

as if it almost means me,

but never fully arrives as me.

I have learned to love the season that dims early,

to sit with daylight as it leaves without asking permission,

I have learned to grieve the sun without needing to turn it into something I can hold onto.

I no longer carry each sentence by hand.

It comes to me now—

quickly,

without asking,

as if language itself has started moving faster than the effort of becoming it.

Even the act of speaking no longer feels like translation,

it feels closer to arriving without noticing I was still elsewhere.

Familiar (read from bottom to top)