Like this, with brother's muddy words ringing in my ears, we watched this island that was home to us for a few days fade onto the horizon, into the wake of our ferry ship. We turned our eyes in the other direction & watched the land where our home is get closer & closer until the boat merged with the land & we could walk off with a mass of other passengers into this unknown town that we never even learned the name of. We walked with the other passengers until we came to a place with some platforms & a few parallel pairs of steel rails on the ground. People wanting to be passengers gathered & gathered & then on the horizon we saw what looked like a lighthouse approach. This light came to us on these parallel rails & then it stopped & doors opened & we pushed & shoved our way into this moving lighthouse. We made airspaces for ourselves & stood in the same place for a long time as some of the other passengers grumbled & yelled at each other in this language they speak here, fighting for space. One woman turned white & looked like a fish out of water as she gasped for air & was quickly rushed to the only open window to suck what little air came in through this cracked window. A man sitting on my feet spoke a language that didn't even resemble the main language of this country, but of another place further south. Like this we rode, occasionally shifting our weight, like flamingoes, until finally we arrived at the final station & everyone unpeeled themselves from the inside of this train & rushed out onto a platform. We were spit out into the streets of our home city & walked through these zigzagging alleys trying to find a place to fill our bellies with something other than than the fruits of the sea we'd been eating. As we usually do after being away for the sake of being away, we didn't go home first & change our clothes, but with our bags still on our backs we went to a place to fill our bellies as if we were people not from this city, but only visiting for the sake of visiting, or stopping off on the way to somewhere else. I'm not sure why we do this, but this is what we always do—it has become our ritual.