Walked into the restaurant and said “hi”,
they look straight through me then reply,
“Uber eats? Please wait outside”,
“Well, I’d rather just join my friends, if you don’t mind”,
They gesture to pass, releasing a sigh,
Like I’d asked for too much, just by being alive.
I sit down feeling lighter than I should, heavier than I let on,
Telling my nerves: take up space. You’ve done nothing wrong.
In London, they’d say I was “one of the good ones”
which is just a polite way of saying
“I don’t flinch around you.”
They smile while quietly weighing
the parts of me they’d rather not view
Exit the restaurant, hop in an Uber and off he bolts
Weaving through traffic unpacking the faults
He says… “I’ve left behind all I knew, all I loved
transplanted here, so my children don’t starve
The papers smiled, the borders let me pass,
but out on the street, kindness wears masks
So I blend into the shadows, and I dare not ask
Why do they see me as the underclass?”
He says that I’d never understand
That I’m light on my feet, accustomed to this land.
I don’t carry the same weight,
Swiftly passing through gates
London made me soft.
Too polished. Untouched by cost
Too fluent in the right rooms
Some absences come with silence.
Others settle inside me.
My neighbour is in the building lobby,
He doesn’t enter the elevator with me…
Never has, never meets my eyes
Not after the time he yelled at me to leave
He longs for the stability of Salazar,
a new verse in his Fado, his grief
He doesn’t miss the chains, but the rhythm of order:
Fátima on the mantle, Fado in the air,
football on Sundays to silence despair.
Now rent is up and faith is low
the past feels safer than what we know.
It spills into me, his longing, his fear.
I feel my own ache, and theirs too.
I carry stories no one meant to give.
I’m fluent in silence, fluent in code
but no one asks what it costs to live:
What it takes to navigate
To hide my edges and assimilate
We’ve all been spun
into different corners of the same web.
Some with rage, some with silence.
All of us learning, in different ways
what it’s costing us to stay
