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Yuna Hollander came to Canada when she was five, hanging on the arms of her parents.
It was after the World War II. A tale as old as time. They were looking for a better life. Desperate enough to fight tooth and nail to stay, not enough foresight to realised what they were getting themselves into.
She never talked much about what it was like growing up. Shane never really asked. He didn’t know how to. The words felt too big for his mouth, and his mother had never handed him the vocabulary for this kind of grief. It didn’t start feeling like grief until recently.
He only knew that she didn’t speak Japanese, not since high school when she perfected the accent so no one could say she didn't belong because she had a slight limp in her voice. His grandparents didn’t speak it either. Not to him, anyway. Sometimes Shane would catch them murmuring to each other in the kitchen, sounds he couldn’t place, syllables that slipped away before he could hold them. But they never turned those words toward him. The first rule to belonging was faking it enough until you made it.
And Shane was going to be the first of them to really make it.
For most of his life, everyone was content in the fact that Shane would grow up knowing only English and French. Two official languages. Two keys to fitting in.
But Shane knew he wasn’t Canadian. Not fully. Not since he was twelve and Derek from Maths class made him realise it wasn’t about the shows you grew up with or the languages you spoke or even the anthem you sang every morning with your hand on your chest.
It was your look.
And Shane Hollander never looked right to them. It was the hue of his skin—not quite enough of anything, too much of something else. The shape of his eyes. The way his bones propped up his muscles, the architecture of his face a blueprint they couldn’t read.
And maybe you could hide your features with makeup, contour your way into something more palatable, but there was no changing your bones. You couldn’t break them and morph them into whatever shape was acceptable because even Shane himself didn’t fully know what was wrong with his bones. He just knew that the other kids could tell. That they looked at him and saw something that needed to be questioned. Where are you from? No, where are you really from?
He learned to answer before they could ask. Learned to make himself smaller in the right ways, louder in the right moments. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like to be a mini copy of David Hollander. Same jaw. Same pale skin that flushed red in the cold. Same eyes that didn't make strangers curious.
His dad always said Shane was the best thing that happened to them because he carried all their features. He said it like a gift, like pride, not realising the weight of it. All their features. As if Shane was a canvas and both his parents had painted on him, not knowing the world would only see one artist’s work as wrong.
And Shane loved his mom. He really did. But sometimes, he wondered what it would be like to carry parts of her in his heart and not his look. To have inherited her laugh, her stubbornness, her way of seeing the world—without inheriting the face that made people pause. The face that made them ask questions. The face that made them question whether he belonged to his own father.
He wondered what it would be like to love her without the weight of looking like her.
And he hated himself for wondering.
Hockey was an escape. Hockey gave him a jersey and a number and a team, and for sixty minutes at a time, no one cared what his face looked like as long as his hands could do what they needed to do.
Hockey was, as his mom always liked to retell in great detail, the thing that made her feel Canadian. She said it with such warmth, such unguarded joy, that Shane never had the heart to ask if it was the sport she loved or the belonging it promised. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was the same thing.
On the ice, he had a helmet that covered his face. The cage that pressed lines into his vision, sectioning the world into manageable pieces. The padding that made his bones the same as the other players—same bulk, same silhouette, same armoured anonymity. And the name on the jersey was Hollander. Western and fully Canadian. A name that didn’t make anyone pause.
For sixty minutes, he was Shane the hockey player. Not Shane the half-Asian boy with too many limbs and muscles in strange places. Not Shane the question mark.
Just Shane. Just a body doing what it was trained to do. And he lived for it. He was good at it.
Until he took off the helmet and the questions came. Circling around his identity as if it made any difference to his achievements.
Shane, what was it like to be the second most promising pick as an Asian-Canadian? Shane, what was it like to be the first Asian captain of a team like Montreal Metros? Shane. Shane. Shane.
Being half-Asian was rather funny sometimes. In a cruel, absurdist kind of way. Most people chose to not acknowledge it or ignore it entirely unless there was a narrative to be served. His features were Schrödinger’s box—both visible and invisible depending on what was convenient.
And the most common narrative was this: Shane Hollander was a role model. A trailblazer. Something that other Asian-Canadian kids could look up to and see themselves in.
Yuna Hollander was proud of the narrative. She clipped every article that mentioned it, saved every interview where Shane smiled and said the right things about representation and dreams. It was his selling point in a way. The good, model Asian boy who made it. Polite. Hardworking. Non-threatening. All the stereotypes gift-wrapped and presented as inspiration.
Asian until the light hit his face at a strange angle and suddenly he was white instead.
Maybe this was what it meant to be half. Asian for the diversity statistics. For the headlines. For the kids who sent him letters that he didn’t know how to answer. White—or close enough—for the comfort. When teams wanted to market him without making it about race. When broadcasters stumbled over the pronunciation of his mother’s maiden name and quietly decided to just not mention it.
Shane was glad, in a way, that their questions weren’t more cutting. Maybe they were afraid of what it would reveal the same way he was. He knew he didn’t want to hear:
What was it like, representing kids who were connected to a part of him that he never felt was part of him to begin with?
What was it like, being a symbol for a culture whose language he didn’t speak, whose traditions he only knew in fragments, whose history he'd had to Google like a stranger?
What was it like, receiving letters from Japanese-Canadian children who looked at him and saw hope, when Shane looked at himself and saw a fraud?
He didn’t have answers. Only questions.
And a growing suspicion that the questions themselves were the only honest thing about him.
Rozanov was brash and loud in a way Shane could never be.
He took up space like it was owed to him. Sprawled across benches, laughed with his whole chest, spoke with his hands and his eyebrows and every part of himself that wanted to be heard. He didn’t sound like he belonged. The accent sat thick on his tongue, vowels shaped wrong, consonants landing in unfamiliar places.
But he didn’t seem to care. Didn’t need to.
At eighteen, with that accent and that infuriating smile and a style of hockey that felt like a challenge every time he touched the puck, Rozanov took the win in Saskatchewan. And somewhere between the first whistle and the final buzzer, he took a bit of Shane's heart with him too.
Shane didn’t have a name for it then. Didn’t know what to call the way his eyes kept finding Rozanov on the ice, tracking him like a problem he needed to solve. Didn’t know why the loss burned differently than other losses. Why it felt personal in a way that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the boy who wouldn’t stop looking at him like he knew something Shane didn’t.
He took the win back in 2009 and the realisation that Rozanov was what Shane wished he could be.
Sharp cheekbones and pale eyes and European in all the ways that mattered to them. White in the way that came with history books and statues and beauty standards. Foreign, yes. But the right kind of foreign. The kind that was exotic instead of suspicious. Interesting instead of invasive.
He belonged to any room he set foot into as long as he didn’t open his mouth.
And even when he did—even when the accent made people's eyebrows raise—it was curiosity, not hostility. The answer was written in his face, his bones, his skin. Russian. Obviously. Completely. And that was it. His ethnicity never became his whole being. His achievements never got bundled up with role model and Asian. Rozanov was Rozanov.
He could choose when to reveal his foreignness. He could close his mouth and disappear into any crowd of white faces, anonymous and unquestioned.
Shane couldn’t close his face.
Shane’s foreignness announced itself before he ever spoke a word. It walked into rooms ahead of him. It stayed long after he left.
Sometimes, Shane thought, he was jealous of the way Rozanov was born in Russia.
Not of Russia itself. Not the politics or the winters or anything he read in the news. But of the having. The way Rozanov could speak Russian without thinking, the words rising up from some deep well inside him that had been filled since birth. The way he didn’t have to translate himself. The way his culture wasn’t something he studied—it was something he breathed.
Shane watched him sometimes. The little unconscious quirks that came from growing up somewhere that made sense. The way Rozanov gestured when he talked, emphatic and unrestrained. The way he swore under his breath when frustrated, Russian curses slipping out before English could catch up. The superstitions before games. The food he talked about missing. The holidays Shane had never heard of that Rozanov mentioned like everyone should know.
All Shane knew of his heritage was Lunar New Year. A reverence for Shinto and Buddhism in equal mix. The random things like shoji and shogi.
These weren’t things Rozanov had to learn. They lived in his bones.
And when Rozanov walked through the streets of Moscow—Shane imagined, anyway, built the picture in his head from interviews and photographs—there were people who looked like him. Everywhere. A whole country of faces that matched.
Shane didn’t know what that felt like. He couldn’t even imagine it.
He wished he could have that. Even a fraction of it. So that when he traced his name on the family line all the way up—past his mom, past his grandparents, past the great-grandparents he only knew as names on documents—that half of him would feel more than a description on a piece of paper.
Japanese.
Nikkeijin.
A word that meant of Japanese descent. A word that existed specifically because people like him needed a category. Not Japanese enough to be Japanese. Not Canadian enough to be unmarked. Something in between. Something hyphenated. Something that required explanation.
Shane had looked it up once, late at night, the screen too bright in his dark bedroom. He’d read about the waves of emigration. The internment camps in Canada that no one talked about. The way whole communities had been scattered, rebuilt, scattered again. The language lost in a single generation because survival meant sounding like everyone else.
His family’s story was in there somewhere. In the statistics. In the historical records. But he couldn’t find them. Couldn’t trace the line from those black-and-white photographs to his grandparents’ kitchen, to his mother’s careful English, to himself.
The information existed. The connection didn’t.
All he had was a word that told him what he was but not who.
Shane didn’t think much of it again as he slowly went from being a boy to being a man.
There was too much going on. Between training and games, between being enough and proving that he was more than enough, between the secret hookups and keeping a dirty part of himself lodged between his ribs, Shane simply didn’t have time.
But then Rozanov was shoving his tongue down Shane’s throat. His mouth was making that sound, sharper and harsher, saying all sort of things in a language Shane couldn’t understand. But it made Rozanov feel alive and human in way Shane couldn’t take his eyes off him.
It made Shane questioned again, when he was alone in his sheets, what it would be like if he knew that half of him just as Rozanov did.
The question slipped out over dinner, somewhere between his dad clearing the plates and his mom pouring more tea. A simple question. Casual. As if he hadn’t been carrying it in his chest for months.
What’s it like? Japanese.
His mom’s hands stilled on the teapot. For a moment, Shane thought she wouldn’t answer. That she’d brush it off the way she always did when conversations wandered too close to the past. Change the subject. Laugh it away. Offer him more food.
But she didn’t.
“Japanese is,” she paused, looking down at her hands. The steam rose between them, curling and disappearing. “How should I say this. It is the language of shape. The closest you get to how words make sense when you write it.”
Shane didn't say anything. He was afraid that if he spoke, she'd remember herself. Remember that they didn't talk in past, only future.
Because past was the place where the things you couldn’t be go.
“Each word made its subject known,” she continued, softer now. “Tree. Mountain. River. It wasn’t abstract. There were no extra layers between the character and its meaning.”
She traced something on the table with her fingertip. A character Shane couldn’t read.
“When I was little, my mother taught me to write my name. Yuna.” Her finger moved again, invisible ink on wood. “She said the way you write it matters. The balance. The stroke order. It’s an art form.”
She dropped her hand.
“I don’t remember how to write it anymore.”
The words landed quietly. No drama. No tears. Just a fact, delivered like a weather report. It might rain tomorrow. I don’t remember how to write the name my mother gave me.
“Anyway,” she said, and her voice was lighter now, practised. “It’s not practical. English, French. That’s what you need here.”
Here. As if there still existed somewhere. As if she hadn’t spent forty years trying to erase it.
Shane nodded. Took a sip of his own tea. Let the silence settle.
But later that night, alone in his childhood bedroom with the ceiling he’d memorised as a kid, he opened his phone. Typed how to write Yuna in Japanese into the search bar.
Two characters. 優奈. Not really Yuna as he has thought but Yuuna.
He stared at them for a long time. Tried to see the picture in them. The meaning in the shape.
He couldn’t.
But he screenshot it anyway. Saved it in a folder he didn’t name. And when he finally fell asleep, he dreamed of his mother as a little girl, tracing her name over and over until her fingers remembered what her mouth forgot.
Somewhere between Rozanov becoming Ilya and Ilya becoming his boyfriend, Shane started learning Russian.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. Not really. It started with the small things—picking up words that Ilya muttered under his breath, curses and endearments that Shane learned to recognise by the shape of Ilya’s mouth before he understood their meaning. Blyat when he stubbed his toe. Solnyshko when Shane did something that made him soft. The words seeped in like water through cracks, filling spaces Shane didn’t know were empty.
Then it became deliberate.
There was a barrier between what Ilya wanted to say and what he meant whenever he spoke in English. A delay that Shane wanted to remove because he wanted to understand Ilya fully. To make it easier for him just as how easy and loved Ilya made him feel.
So he downloaded apps. Bought textbooks that he hid in his luggage like contraband. Practised in hotel rooms, alone, whispering to himself in a language that felt like a secret. The Cyrillic alphabet was its own puzzle—letters that looked familiar but weren’t, sounds that didn’t exist in English, rules that contradicted everything he knew.
He changed the position of his tongue. Learned to press it against his teeth differently, to let the sounds roll from somewhere deeper in his throat. Changed the way he opened his mouth, wider for some vowels, tighter for others.
And it came out foreign. Deeper and accented and imperfect, like everything Shane did. His Rs were too soft. His Ыs were impossible. He conjugated verbs wrong and mixed up his cases and sometimes Ilya would just stare at him, trying to parse what he was attempting to say.
But Ilya loved it.
That was the thing. Ilya loved it.
He lit up every time Shane tried. Corrected him gently, repeated words slowly, let Shane trace the sounds with his lips until they stuck. He didn’t laugh—not meanly, anyway. Sometimes he grinned, bright and delighted, like Shane was giving him a gift he hadn’t known to ask for.
“You sound like a child,” Ilya told him once, fond and teasing, his fingers tracing patterns on Shane’s bare shoulder. “A very determined child.”
“I’m practising,” Shane said, defensive.
“I know.” Ilya kissed his temple. “Is very cute.”
And Shane—Shane, who had spent his whole life trying to sound like he belonged, who had wanted to reshape his jaws so his tongue positioned right, who had learned to answer questions before they could be asked—Shane found that he didn’t mind. He didn’t mind sounding wrong. He didn’t mind the accent that marked him as a beginner, as an outsider, as someone still learning.
Because Ilya heard him anyway. Ilya understood him anyway. Ilya looked at him like his imperfect Russian was something precious instead of something to be fixed.
Shane loved it too.
He loved the way Russian felt in his mouth—heavy and round, full of sounds that English didn’t have room for. He loved the way Ilya’s eyes softened when Shane tried to say something in his language, even badly. He loved that this was something he could give, a bridge he could build with his own tongue, a way of saying I want to know you without having to say it at all.
He loved that this language was a choice.
No one had decided for him. No one had taken it away before he could hold it. No one had told him it wasn’t practical, wasn’t necessary, wasn’t worth the space it took up in his mouth.
Shane chose Russian. Shane chose Ilya. And for the first time in his life, the foreignness on his tongue felt like freedom instead of failure.
“Can you teach me Japanese?” Ilya asked one lazy afternoon.
The sun was still hot in the sky. Middle of summer drawing to an end all too soon. They were at the cottage sprawled on the dock with their feet dangling over the water. The kind of afternoon that felt stolen. The kind that Shane used to think wasn’t meant for people like him.
Shane let Ilya’s fingers trace lines on his back. Absent patterns. Maybe letters. Maybe nothing at all. He watched the shimmer of the water and the way it reflected the light like glass. Like something that would shatter if you touched it wrong.
“Why?” Shane asked.
“Because I want to know you too.”
Ilya said it simply. Like it was obvious. As if half of Shane’s soul wasn’t something Shane himself didn’t understand too.
He wrapped his arms around Shane's waist, pulling him closer into a warm hug. His chin hooked over Shane’s shoulder, stubble scratching gently against his neck.
“I know English,” Ilya continued, his breath warm against Shane’s skin. “A bit of French. And now I want to know Japanese. It is half of what made you you, no?”
Half of what made you you.
Shane felt something crack in his chest. A small fissure. The water kept shimmering. The sun kept beating down. Everything stayed perfectly still while Shane tried to figure out how to say the thing he’d never said out loud to anyone.
“I never learned.”
Three words. They came out quieter than he meant them to. Almost lost in the sound of the water lapping against the dock.
Ilya’s arms tightened around him. Not pulling away. Just—holding.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don't speak Japanese.” Shane kept his eyes on the water. Couldn't look at Ilya. Couldn't stand to see confusion turn into pity. “I never learned. My mom doesn't speak it. My grandparents didn't teach her. It just—” He stopped. Swallowed. “It got lost.”
The silence stretched between them. Shane could feel Ilya processing, rearranging the picture he had of Shane in his head. Adjusting for this new information. This gap where something should have been.
“But,” Ilya started, slow and careful, “you are Japanese.”
“Half.”
“Half,” Ilya repeated, like he was tasting the word. “But you don’t…”
“No.”
Shane finally turned his head. Met Ilya’s eyes. They were soft—not with pity, not quite. Something closer to sadness. The kind of sadness that came from watching someone you loved hurt in a way you couldn’t fix.
“My family,” Shane tried to explain, “They want to fit in. Assimilate. There was already Japanese-Canadians when they immigrate here but everyone made it out to be a mostly shameful thing. Everyone was claiming they’re not fully Japanese but as Canadians first who happen to have Japanese ancestry.”
That was what he learned from Google and hearing his uncle drunkenly talked about it one Thanksgiving, when the adults in the room didn’t realise he was there as well.
“By the time it got to me, there was nothing left to pass down.” Shane shrugged, trying to aim for nonchalant.
It probably failed.
He thought of his mother's hands tracing characters on the kitchen table. The name she couldn't write anymore. The folder on his phone he still hadn't opened since that night.
“I have a screenshot,” he said, and it sounded so pathetic when he said it out loud. “Of my mom’s name in Japanese. I saved it. I look at it sometimes. But I can’t—I don’t know what it means. Not really. I just know it’s hers. Maybe. I learned later that there are different ways to write it depending on the meaning you want the name to have.”
Ilya was quiet for a long moment. His thumb traced circles on Shane's hip. Slow. Steady. Grounding.
“I’m sorry,” Ilya said finally. “I didn’t know.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“No. But I am still sorry. That it was taken.”
Taken. Not lost. Taken.
Shane felt his throat tighten. He’d always thought of it as something that slipped away. Something his family let go of. But Ilya was right, wasn’t he? It was taken. By the kids who made his mother flatten her voice. By the world that told his grandparents their language wasn’t welcome here. By every system that promised belonging if you just gave up enough of yourself.
It was taken, and Shane was left holding the empty space where it used to be.
“It felt like a personal failure,” Shane admitted. “For a long time. Like I should have—I don’t know. Found it on my own. Learned it anyway. But every time I think about it, I don’t even know where to start. It’s not like Russian. There’s no one to practice with. No one to tell me if I’m saying it right. Just me and a screen and a language that should have been mine but isn’t.”
Ilya pressed a kiss to his shoulder. Soft. Unhurried.
“Then we learn together,” he said.
Shane blinked. “What?”
“Japanese. We learn together.” Ilya shrugged, like it was simple. Like it was easy. “You teach me what you find. I teach you what I find. We figure it out.”
“Ilya, I told you, I don’t—”
“I know. You don’t know it. So we start from nothing.” Ilya’s arms tightened again. “I am good at starting from nothing. And I am very stubborn. You know this.”
Shane laughed. It came out wet, half-choked, surprising him. “You’re serious.”
“Always serious about you.”
The water kept shimmering. The sun kept sinking lower in the sky. And Shane sat there, wrapped in Ilya’s arms, feeling the steady rise and fall of Ilya's chest against his back.
It felt like a good time to finally admit the truth.
“I’m scared.”
The words came out smaller than he intended. Almost swallowed by the sound of the water. But Ilya heard. Ilya always heard.
He looked down at Shane. The setting sun cast shadows over his eyelashes, golden light catching in his pale eyes, pretty in a way that always rendered Shane speechless.
“Scared?” Ilya repeated. Not pushing. Just making space.
Shane took a breath. Let it out slowly. Tried to find the shape of the thing he’d been carrying for so long.
“Of what it would mean,” he said. “I’m scared that even as I learn it, it will feel like… nothing.”
The word hung in the air. Nothing. The worst possible outcome.
“I’m scared that I’ll learn the words and write the characters and practice until my mouth shapes the sounds correctly, and it still won’t—” He stopped. Swallowed. “It won’t feel like mine. It’ll just prove that this half of me was never really mine to begin with. That it was lost too long ago. That there’s nothing left to reclaim, just… empty space where something should have been.”
Ilya drew Shane to the crook of his neck and held him there. There was no words that could be said to make it better so Ilya didn’t say anything, just anchored him in the skin to skin contact.
“And if that happens,” Shane continued, quieter now, “then I’ll have to accept it. I’ll have to stop hoping. I’ll have to look at myself and admit that I’m not half of anything. I’m just—” His voice cracked. “I’m just a whole person with a piece missing. And the piece isn’t coming back.”
He laughed, but it wasn't funny. It was the kind of laugh that came out when crying felt like too much.
“It’s stupid,” he said. “I know it’s stupid. But if I don’t learn it, then I won't know. I can keep pretending. I can keep fantasising that if I just tried, if I just committed, then suddenly everything would make sense. That I'd understand myself in ways I couldn’t before. That the limbo would end and I’d finally—finally—feel like I belonged somewhere. To something.”
Ilya was quiet for a long moment. His thumb traced slow circles on Shane’s hip. Thinking. Processing. Shane had learned to wait for Ilya’s silences. They weren’t empty—they were full of words being assembled, translated, chosen with care.
“Is not stupid,” Ilya said finally. His voice was low, serious. “Is not stupid to be scared of losing hope. Hope is—” He paused, searching. “Hope is very heavy thing to carry. And very painful thing to drop.”
Shane felt his throat tighten.
“But Shane.” Ilya shifted, turning Shane gently so they were facing each other. His hands came up to cup Shane’s face, warm and sure. “What if it doesn’t feel like nothing?”
Shane blinked. “What?”
“You are so sure it will feel empty. But what if it doesn’t?” Ilya’s thumbs brushed across his cheekbones. “What if you learn, and it feels like something? Even small something. Even tiny piece of something.” He tilted his head, eyes searching Shane’s. “You are already grieving outcome you don’t know yet. You are already mourning thing that might not die.”
“But what if—”
“What if, what if.” Ilya shook his head. “I know what if. I know scared. But Shane, you are not learning alone. You are not opening box alone.” His forehead pressed against Shane’s. “I am here. And if it is empty, then we sit with empty together. And if it is not—” A small smile. “Then we have something new. Either way, you are not alone with it.”
Shane closed his eyes. Let Ilya’s words wash over him.
He thought about the screenshot on his phone. The words he couldn’t read. The mother who couldn’t write her own name. The grandparents who whispered in a language they never turned toward him.
He thought of the past. The space where what you couldn’t be go.
And he thought about Ilya, standing at the threshold with him, offering to walk in together. Not promising it would be full. Not promising it would be worth it. Just promising to be there.
“Okay,” Shane whispered.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” He opened his eyes. Met Ilya's gaze. “We learn together.”
Ilya smiled. Bright and warm and full of something that looked like pride.
“Together,” he agreed.
It wasn’t resolution. It wasn’t certainty.
But it was a start.
Shane still didn’t really feel Japanese nor Canadian.
Some days he thought he was getting closer. He would read a word in Japanese and feel something flicker in his chest—recognition, maybe, or the ghost of recognition. He would watch his mother laugh at something on television and see himself in the way her eyes crinkled, and for a moment, the looking like her didn’t hurt. He would stand on Canadian ice, hear the anthem, and feel something that wasn’t quite belonging but wasn’t quite exclusion either.
He still existed in the strange space between being and inhabiting. A space without edges. A hyphen with nothing on either side.
Being meant the thing was yours. It lived in you, and you lived in it, and there was no separation between the two. Being was the way Ilya was Russian—in his bones, in his tongue, in the way he moved through the world. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a performance. It simply was.
Inhabiting meant you occupied the space without owning it. You walked through rooms that weren’t built for you. You spoke languages that someone else had handed you. You wore an identity like a coat that didn’t quite fit—too tight in the shoulders, too loose at the hem—but you wore it anyway because you had nothing else.
Shane inhabited Canadian. He had the passport and the accent and the anthem memorised. He’d bled for the flag on international ice. But he didn’t be it. Not fully. Not in the way that went unquestioned.
Shane inhabited Japanese. He had the face and the family and a screenshot of a name he couldn't read. He had the fragments—Lunar New Year and the vague shape of Shinto and the knowledge that somewhere, generations back, someone had given up a language so he could exist. But he didn’t be it. Not really. Not in any way that counted.
“I won’t say I understand.” Ilya had said. “But you’ve always been Shane Hollander to me.”
There was nothing more Western about Shane’s name. There was nothing more Eastern about his look.
And maybe that was okay.
Maybe the limbo wasn’t something to escape but something to furnish. To make liveable. To fill with whatever pieces he could find—Russian words from a lover’s mouth, Japanese characters on a screen, a mother’s name traced in invisible ink on a kitchen table.
Maybe belonging wasn’t a place you arrived at. Maybe it was a thing you built, slowly, imperfectly, out of the scraps that survival left behind.
Shane didn’t know yet. He was still figuring it out.
But Ilya's hand was warm in his. And his mother’s name was saved in his phone. And somewhere, in the space between being and inhabiting, Shane was learning to exist.
Not whole. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But it would be on his terms.