The Girl Who Wouldn't Wait
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Wait
The smell of boiled milk clung to the kitchen air. My mother sat at the table, a book open in her hands, her voice carrying the story across the small room. I leaned against the chair leg, the words sliding over me.
I loved this part of the day. The small world we made between the table and the stove, between her voice and my listening. I could have stayed there forever, wrapped in stories.
But more than anything, I wanted to read them myself.
Sometimes I didn’t like the ones she chose. Other times, I’d fall in love with a story and ask for it every night until she grew tired of it. “No more,” she’d say. “Not again.”
I didn’t know the word for it then, but what I wanted was to decide. Not just the stories. I wanted the choice. The power to return to the ones I loved, to read them again and again without needing permission.
She was a teacher. I asked her to teach me to read. “You’ll learn in school,” she said. “No need to do it before.”
But waiting has never been easy for me.
One early spring afternoon, when I was about four, I took a blank sheet of paper and laid it carefully over a newspaper page. The paper was stiff. The pencil dragged. I didn’t know what the letters meant, but I copied them like someone trying to steal a secret. My hand cramped. The pencil smeared. But I filled the page.
It was not writing. Not really. It was mimicry. A child’s quiet defiance.
When I brought the paper to my mother, I felt pride gather in my throat like a song. “Look,” I said. “I can write. Will you teach me to read now?”
She looked at the page, then at me. Her voice was flat. “This isn’t writing,” she said. “It’s nonsense. Scribbles. You’re wasting time.”
I stood there, still holding the page. Something inside me collapsed. Not from shame, but from the sudden quiet where I had expected recognition.
“I only wanted to read,” I said. “You wouldn’t help. So I tried. This is all I could do.”
She softened then, her voice quieter.
“You’re not going to give up, are you?”
I shook my head.
“I need to read now,” I said, with the certainty of someone who had decided she would not wait to be invited into her own life.
Behind her, on the far wall of the kitchen, sunlight made a perfect rectangle.
It was too precise for the way the curtains hung. Sharp at the edges, steady as if cut into the air itself. Inside it, the dust in the air seemed to pause, each speck suspended, unmoving, like they were listening.
For a moment, the dust aligned, not randomly, but in crooked rows. Lines. Almost like writing.
The spoon in my mother’s hand stopped mid-stir. The clock ticked louder, each second echoing in the pause. Even the milk seemed to still, its surface holding its breath.
I blinked, and the marks blurred, but for one breath I thought I could read them, as if the air itself were copying the page I held.
I glanced back at my paper. They were uneven, bent, stubborn.
I didn’t tell my mother. She wouldn’t have believed me, and maybe I didn’t believe it myself.
The kitchen smelled faintly of boiled milk, the way it always did, as if the air had kept a memory of mornings before
An excerpt from The Doors Between Our Selves, a memoir about migration, identity, and becoming.