Water, word, rock. In the middle of all these, and composed of all these, I am a strange vegetal growth struggling to send down roots into this soil, which will always taste strange to my tongue. In a country that has perfected the art of forgetting and denial (both are synonyms), I am wandering in these wintry woods trying to slough off the skin of memory. But how can a forest clear itself of all the holes drilled in tree trunks by strange birds, twisted tree trunks stranded like whales across winding paths after lighting strikes, roots which had bored steadily through bed rock and now clutch it between their innumerable fingers?

My friend has stopped replying to my letters. This is because either the exiled do not have any friends left after the rupture or because they no longer speak the same language. Words, each affixed with a foreign stamp, drop into distant postboxes, and then combust instantly in the hands of those whom they seek to explain themselves to, to divest their secret troubles to. It would be easier to talk to mirrors. Someone please ask the friend: how many languages do fish in the ocean speak?

So one learns to adapt like a cactus in the desert. Body sprouts forbidding thorns and draws close to the bone all the succulent sap of emotions. The knife that seeks to drink from such a body has to learn to maneuver between the thorns to slice through to the wetness of tears. And for flowers –those magnificent flowers – one awaits those ten-year rains, for isn’t every exile a reluctant master of the waiting game, a ship waiting on becalmed seas for something (the wind?) to turn?