Shamita.
I have stood in grocery aisles
explaining my name twice.
I have watched strangers try it,
softening their mouths around it
like something almost sweet.
Second-generation who chose snow.
Daughter of people who carried heat across an ocean
and learned to call winter ordinary,
though I remember my mother’s first winter coat,
how she held it closed at the throat as if guarding a flame.
They did not cross water for me to be small.
Still, I have made myself smaller in rooms
that measured worth in vowels.
I grew up translating weather and expectation at the same time.
Summer meant mango juice running down my wrists,
ants gathering in sweet delirium.
Winter meant black ice, bus stops,
my breath rising like something leaving me
and returning only because it had nowhere else to go.
There are days I miss a place
I have never lived.
Days I resent the pain of it.
Days I am grateful for it.
I live in the seam,
where monsoon stories meet mountain rain,
where spice smoke threads through pine,
where the past does not argue
but hums low and steady.
I am not divided.
I am layered.
Layered means I have shed skin.
Layered means I have chosen.
I am here,
in the thin blue of winter morning,
in the scent of ginger on my hands,
long enough to say
this too is mine.