Citizenship

Finally I got it, 16 years after we decided to settle and 17 years after I first stepped foot on this "promised" land. 

It could be decades of waiting and decades of lingering, I don't care. But it was one year too late. One year too late. 

My popo couldn't wait for me to return. 

Now I don't remember how much I cried last year, for months. 

Time does heal. Especially for me. 

I just wipe it out, throw it away. Cause it is too hard to carry along the pain and guilt. 

I made a choice. I chose my kids, I was unwilling to risk returning to China and walking into the claws of the authoritarian regime. 

It was my own pain and my own guilt. 

All I wished for was my popo's complete understanding and forgiveness before she passed. 

I turned into a sorceress, channeling my ability to connect across space. And I believed that my popo heard it. 

At least, so I believed. 

I have established a life here, in this comparably "free and promised" land, so my children and their children do not need to go through what I went through.

Does time truly heal, though? Did I truly put all of it behind me?

Every time, we have to lock up the Momo who feels too much. Too much affection, too strong connection, too intense pain. All those beautiful stories and fateful heartbreaks.

Some of them Momos have been in the dungeon for years, we don't wish to check them up, only prepare to put them back immediately if they ever attempt to escape. 

That's the only way we function, as one singular entity. 

So tell us, if time does heal?

Now I've got it, I wish to enter the territories I was forbidden or had massive trouble entering before: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Europe, UK, and many more.