The Faces I Don't Recognize

There are pieces of me
that don’t have names.
Features that flicker in mirrors,
asking questions I don’t know how to answer.

My husband traces his line
through generations,
names that sound like legacy,
places that hold stories.

And I—
I know Peru.
I know the altitude of my mother’s voice
and the dryness of my father’s grief.
I know that one grandparent was from Chile,
another from Spain,
but after that—
there’s only fog.

My father would have told me,
I’m sure of it.
He would have sat me down
with an Inka Cola and a napkin
and sketched out a family tree
with the kind of reverence
only he could give to the past.

But I never asked.
And now he’s gone.
And the roots that fed him
are buried too deep for me to reach.

Sometimes I see myself
in reflections
that don’t belong to me—
a hint of something East Asian,
a softness around the eyes
that strangers try to name.

I found a photo once—
my grandfather,
stoic and sharp-eyed,
looking more Japanese
than Peruvian.

Maybe he was.
Maybe I am.
I don’t know.

No one asked the questions
while there was still time to hear the answers.

I think of blood
as both mystery and map,
and I wonder
what I would find
if I followed mine back far enough.

I think of my daughter—
how I want to give her a story
that begins before me,
a name for every silence
I never learned to break.