Native Tongue

Carlos Andrés Gómez | 143 I went there to meet a man with my father’s name. We sat, flanked on all sides by other awkwardly assembled pairs, each obsessed with the shapes of each other’s mouths and the sounds they made. He grabbed his crotch and slowly unfurled a word I knew he had been saving: espectacular. That was the way he described how he was in bed, taunting and flirting while shaking his head disapprovingly at the way my tongue rolled an r like a mouth anaesthetized by too much tequila, my mind feeling familiar as the wide-­ arched house we lived in when I was five. I remember beating my open palm on a screen that was nearly unhinged by a burglar, or was that just a dream? Sometimes I search for the exact day I stopped dreaming in the language that sings my name. What it felt like to watch something slowly drift away without knowing if it might ever find its way back. I wonder if I dreamt that night at all. He snapped his fingers near my face, told me poetry Native Tongue Carlos Andrés Gómez 144 | Carlos Andrés Gómez I needed a lot of work. I’d been doing this with him twice a week, an escape from the life I’d built. So I relished each clumsy syllable like a secret I was finally being freed from, trying to learn something from a man with the same name as the one who worked so hard to rid me of it. ...