"Why doesn't she speak it?" scoffs the nail salon lady. I poke through the dried leaves of my mother tongue. I open my mouth, and close it. The silence swells, a bullfrog, broken by the croak of a fake laugh from my mother.

My search history, an hour later:
learn tagalog
learn tagalog free pdf
tagalog course free online
free ta
how to do filipino accent

Mabuhay. Mah-boo-hay. Whitened syllables. Clumsy tongue rolls. My 'filipino accent' flops to the floor and oozes.

Eventually, you reach a point

What we said and did that day was unbelievable.
 

I awake from my nap, from my skin being tenderly embraced by the hurricane five feet upward. Their new ceiling fan. No noise roused me from my slumbers, in fact, it is unbearably quiet, but it is midday, and my body is ready to resume its duties. My wet hair hangs sticky to my neck, catching itself on my earrings again and again as I rise from the bed, and move blankly to face the white openness that consumes the hallway. I stand beside her, my Teta, and we talk sparingly, taking in the surroundings, and in my case, pulling myself from that nap.

Inspired by Rubber Soul's poem, Phin, write a piece to describe your username or a nickname you have and how it makes you feel when you/someone else uses it. Does it give you a sense of freedom or power? Does it make you feel childish? For stories, you can also have a character change their name and explain what it symbolizes.
 

The music surfaces from the stairs behind me. Tenor strings accompanied by the looming brassiness of the french horn. It tugs at my ears and scans the glossed etchings of the table. My eyes settle on the weathered blue of the file holder. Something so detached from my surroundings; I am drawn in. Stuffed to the brim with couscous, and recipes so well known you have to scoff at the monotony of reading it over again. With stains, cluttered with lines a seven-year-old hand struck upon the paper. Always an endeavor to sift through the piles of ripped-from-magazine-we-have-to-try-this, and more often than not, I find myself stuck feeling the color on the paper. Breathing in the familiar lilt of the letters, written with a shaky hand so dear to me. Or settling in on the strike of the foreign ink against a yellowing scrap. Squinting to see people I’ve never seen, recipes I haven’t heard of. People I’ve forgotten.

I was discussing Christianity with my mother. I am not a Christian. She is a libral one. I was trying to weave a historical explanation for the differences between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, differences I had read about in a book by a presumptuous academic. I was sitting in the park, bathed in the golden light of sunset and the smell of almost dead grass. I felt so whole. Too whole for half guessed details and hesitant claims. I flopped down on my back, staring up at the unfathomable sky and uttered a generalization just as vast: Religion is our way of making God tangible. 

My mother paused, her forehead creased in thought. She told me she was not sure if she agreed. She shattered the hopeless perfection of it.    
 

My tired eyes and racing mind are up and running, 7:05 feeling strong beneath my feet as they snake their way out from the covers, and sink to the carpet. I have a strange consciousness about my feet as they draw me, then my hungry mind, to my parent’s bedroom. A focus that seemed almost silly, once the news struck my head. My awake-until-one-AM eyes slowly adjust to the light that consumes the room, and I flop on the bed knowing, truly in my heart that she had done it. Hillary Clinton; President of the United States of America. Knowing, with every fold of my brain that yes I, a girl, had her to look up to. That my parent’s votes, dinners they spent anxiously checking the polls, counted. For a girl president. With the satisfaction of an artist, finally sitting back from their work, I lie there. Contentedly; I try to think about what this would mean for me as I grow up. I am reminded that Baba’s lightened brown eyes sit upon my delighted face.