You and I, ma chère langue étrangère, we stand on the banks of the Loire, ruefully watching our poor twisted paper boats lurch downriver in the sunset-gilded waves. The sun simmers steadily upon the same crinkled place, but our broken sentences roll away with the water, last vestiges of this shipwrecked decade, of the bitter harvest sown when first I wrote you a lie. But you have grown, lingua mia, while I have fumed and lamented and remained mired; you have learnt what I could not learn: the true quality of mercy, the art of forgiving the unrepentant. It is you, the betrayed, you, into whose wounds I have spent a decade twisting the knife, who holds out a hand now, you who smiles first with acceptance and understanding. You would help me overcome even myself. I am the one who cringes, who seeks refuge in lonely bitterness with its reassuringly familiar gall and impuissance, because we betray those we love, over and over and over again, when the memory of pain is stronger than reason. If we are lucky, we betray them one less than the number of times they can bear to forgive us. If we are lucky.

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric photographer from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Pleiades, Miracle Monocle, Glassworks, Windsor Review, Moria, CommuterLit, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries hold as a particular fascination for her.