Day 6: Travel
Yumi didn't remember much from her life in Japan, and what she did remember she couldn't be sure was real. Perhaps she'd simply invented some memories from the stories her mother had told her, or confused them with the times she'd gone back over vacations.
But she had several vivid memories from the first trip away from home. The rows of feet at the airport waiting area. The flight attendant asking her "si la petite fille voudra le jus d'pomme?", which was the first time she could remember ever hearing French. Her first sight of Charles de Gaulle airport, the taxt that had taken them to their new home, the way everything had looked when she was small, and the world was so large.
She remembered when her parents had started replacing their familiar words with strange ones, ones like the flight attendant and like everyone else in the new and unusual world they'd entered, and while she couldn't remember exactly when she'd started using them herself, she knew that within a year she wasn't speaking anything else. If someone spoke to her in Japanese she might still be able to answer them, but after ten years in France, in a French-speaking Japanese home, Japanese would feel just as strange and awkward on her tongue as French had once felt on her ears.
- Carth