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Faces were the first to go. On its heels were likes, dislikes, habits, blended together until one Atlantean was inseparable from the other; who liked cooking in the family, whose lyre was that, who dressed in gold at parties? Habits were followed by voices, sounds, humming at too low or too high a frequency, too ‘off’ to be wholly familiar.
And the last to leave was language.
“I don’t remember,” Gura said, voice held carefully blank. She jostled her memories, delicately, like counting loose change in a hand, in case any detail slipped from her fingers. White-noise static blurred the numbers on the coins and buzzed at the corners of her eyes. She brought a hand to her eyes but it came back dry.
Frowning, Gura tried again, concentrating harder, until Kiara tapped on her shoulder, centering them back at the lake where they were located. Kiara glowed bright like a sky lantern, light cascading from the bank of the lake.
“I forget things, too,” Kiara said, slowly, after a pause. Crickets chirped in the dark. One of her hands covered Gura’s own and squeezed in apology. “I’m sorry for asking. I didn’t think it would hurt.”
“I don’t remember how to say home in Atlantean,” Gura said. Kiara asked a simple question, a passing curiosity of what Atlantean sounded like, but more than one of her English words couldn’t find its Atlantean equivalent. Familiar, ugly betrayal came— because really, how could she forget — and went, like the receding tides of an ocean wave.
“It’s important,” Kiara agreed. Warmth radiated from her like a furnace as she inched closer. “You don’t know what’s missing until you look for it.” A space needed filling by language no longer there. Home. Moss. Salmon. Skies?
“Did you want to talk about it? Your own memories?” Gura asked, out of genuine care and curiosity, a dash of diversion for taste. Kiara raised a brow, entirely unimpressed.
“Smooth as gravel, Gura. Jesus. I’m good, thanks.”
Gura bumped shoulders against her with a small smile, a small bandage over the black hole growing in her chest. “I try. Just thought I’d offer.”
Kiara reached for a stone at her side, skipped it twice across the lake. “I’ve had more experience getting used to it. Multiple homes. Multiple losses.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Gura murmured, following Kiara’s lead to toss a stone into the lake. Hers sank into the water without a second skip. “I know it’s hard.”
Kiara opened her mouth to say something, but she stopped herself, hesitating at the last second. She shifted closer instead, pulling Gura into her lap. Heat bloomed on Gura’s cheeks and stuttered in her chest, and it was impossible to tell which heartbeat belonged to hers.
“Teach me something,” Kiara asked. For some reason, Gura wasn’t expecting it. “Something important, or something you don’t want to forget. And I’ll teach you something, too, from a place not here, anymore.”
Gura was given the space to figure it out, silent between them except for the sounds of nature around them. She frowned, playing with one of Kiara’s hands as she thought, until the moonlight flickering silver on the lake snagged on a memory, an echo of comfort falling back into place, though the contexts were long forgotten.
“I think I have it,” Gura said. Nerves lit like sparklers as she shifted, turned around to face Kiara. “It… it should sound like this...”
It took a few false starts, English had mangled the vowels, but she found the tone. Heat built on the back of Gura’s neck as she repeated it several times to make sure she had it right. Kiara tapped idly on Gura’s abdomen in thought.
“Okay,” Kiara said after a moment, and repeated after her, Gura guiding her through the nuances of pronunciation.
It didn’t solve everything. But it helped, seeing Kiara’s mouth wrap around the words like a delicacy, hearing someone else speak a language that had been long dead.
“...What… what does it mean?” Kiara asked, a touch impatient after Gura had asked her to say it one too many times, relishing the way it dripped from Kiara’s tongue.
Gura exhaled. The hole in her chest was less empty than it had been. “It means ‘I love you’.”