By Jeddie Sophronius
I carry mountains wherever I go—from the crater lake of rinjani, the blue fires of ijen, to the everlasting smoke of merapi—I drag my feet in the dirt so the land remembers my footsteps, a path for the ghosts of my ancestors to follow. But this is not the childhood grandmother once tried to run from: bullet casings under her feet on streets full of collapsed rooftops, men with torches and bamboo spears declaring a new era. They were singing they don’t want my people here, they don’t want me, me, unborn and afraid—wait. This is someone else’s story. This is not my land anymore, this is not me, I should never have left my childhood. Look, mother can barely walk, she asks for tea, asks for biscuits, calls my name in her sleep, but I’m nowhere to be found—even the songbirds have stopped their chorus, blaming me for forgetting the mountains. I think of a future when I can start over, but in that future, I still drag my feet, to the shore.
Edge of Heaven
Jeddie Sophronius (he/they) is a Chinese-Indonesian writer from Jakarta. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia and the Editor-in-Chief at Meridian. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. They divide their time between the U.S. and Indonesia.