“I didn’t think the portal would choose you.”

This is the first thing Ma tells you when she finds you standing in your childhood bedroom, unable to remember how you got there. You are grasping for a nonexistent blade at your waist, completely baffled by your child-soft hands and your oversized basketball shorts and the Paramore poster on the wall. There is so much you remember about this room—the striped pink and blue bedsheets and the essay-writing trophy perched on your bookshelf, the dings in the hardwood floor and the slew of secondhand komiks stacked by the lamp on your desk. You clung to these details while you were in Kapulinan, counted them like sheep when you couldn’t sleep on the forest floor, stones pressing into your back like so many bruising fingertips; repeated them in your mind like a prayer when a spirit stole your name, but—were the walls always this shade of blue? And who was Len-len and what were you supposed to give her that was so important that you put a sticky note right above your bed? There is so much that you have forgotten, and all of it hurts. And even Ma, who you know better than anyone, stands there like a stranger. You imagined coming back so many times. You do not know what to do now that you are here.

You whirl around, like Kapulinan will be right there behind you, ready and waiting. You were there just a moment ago, following… following what again? It was important, you remember. You press yourself against the wall, willing it to give.

“The portal is gone,” Ma says.

You swallow, find your voice. “But Kapulinan needs me.”

“It needs someone. It always needs someone. It doesn’t have to be you,” she says. Then she sags against the wall with you.

You sit in the kitchen and stare at the familiar mustard-colored walls, chalk-like dust clinging to the paint in patches. Ma places a glass of water and two paracetamols in front you. You let the glass sweat, the condensation pool. Minutes pass in silence, maybe an hour. She swipes the pills instead, dragging them right through the puddle, and swallows them dry.

“Where did you find the portal?” she asks. She says your name, but like always, you can’t grasp the shape of it even when it feels within reach. Maybe that’s what you were chasing before you ended up back here, but you can’t be sure.

“It was in my mirror,” you say, and you remember how the glass had shimmered, how it rippled when you touched it.

“Why didn’t you call for me?” she asks, and you don’t know how to say you didn’t want to.

You had always known about the portal, even if you didn’t always believe in it. You grew up surrounded by your mother’s paintings, her stories about Kapulinan—of how the first portal she ever found was in a sink full of dirty dishes when she was twelve and still resentful about moving back to the province, of Kapulinan’s iridescent watersky, of the war against the Maharlikans and their magic of reshaping and remaking, of the enemy warrior princess your mother had fallen in love with.

Sometimes, when you were small, Ma would turn the hunt for Kapulinan into a silly game of hide-and-seek, and together, you would poke the slats in your blinds and the rough zipper teeth of your backpack, the tiny holes in your phone speaker and the crumbs from the too-sweet cheese cupcake you liked to have for merienda. And even though Ma said the portal was tied to the house, at school you would still check the erasers and the multi-coloured bulletin boards on the classroom walls, the potted plants in the quadrangle and the soles of your worn Mary Janes. You would stick a hand through the school gate and step on every crack on the uneven sidewalk during your walk home, peering through your front door’s keylock hoping that you would find a portal and you and Ma could go to Kapulinan together. Later, much later, she would tell you the portal only admits one.

Kapulinan was all your mother ever talked about even when you were tired of hearing about it. It was why you could never move out of the shitty house in Meycauayan, not even when your grandparents passed one year after the other, or when the typhoons and the flooding got so bad your furniture perpetually sat on stilts during the rainy season to avoid the murky dirty water; not even when the man who could’ve been your stepfather asked her to join him after he was offered a high-paying job in Ortigas; not even when you begged her, too. She avoided leaving the house at all if she could help it. She worked her three jobs from home, ordered what she could online.

“My place is here,” she would say, and you knew she meant her place was in Kapulinan. You’d always known that, if given the chance, she would leave you. And when your mirror shimmered with the magic of small things, you dove in even though your mother was in the next room. It wasn’t wonder that made you go through. It wasn’t even curiosity to see the place she loved more than you. It was something with teeth and spindly legs that writhed, small and hard as a stone in your gut. You wanted to take Kapulinan away from her. The portal only admits one.

Ma repeats her question. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“You know how it is. What it’s like to see it,” you lie. “All I could do was dive.”

“Right. I get it. I do. I remember. I remember.”

You don’t know what to say as Ma stares at you, through you, so you shrug, and the lack of the pain in your shoulder startles you. You rub the spot where the ache should be and the skin is smooth. “How old am I?” you wonder aloud, but Ma talks over you.

“Has the war finally ended? Is Mira okay? How long had it been since I left? Did anyone ask about me? Were they looking for me?”

“I don’t remember,” you say, though you do. Ma’s face crumples.

“It’s okay. That’s okay. Some things get blurred when you cross,” she says, more to herself than you. “It was like that for me the first few times. The memories will come back. They always do.”

You nod, the details of Kapulinan swelling in your mouth. You’ll tell her someday. For now, your Kapulinan is yours.

Ma clears her throat. You push the glass of water towards her, and the condensation creates a small river between you. She takes a long, slow draft.

“You haven’t been gone from here for very long. Seconds, maybe,” she says. “It’s July 31st. Still summer. School’s in a couple of weeks. Achiever’s Academy. You’re in the ninth grade. Do you remember?” Then, as if remembering your original question, she says, “You’re fifteen.”

For a second, you mistake her voice for the one in your head, the one that only speaks in second-person declarative sentences, the one that tells you things you need to remember, the things you need to do, the things that keep your thoughts straight. Back when Kapulinan was still a story, a game, it was Ma who taught you this technique to counter the Maharlikan reshaping and remaking magic that pervaded the land. Magic, like the world, is built on stories and belief—your voice must be louder than theirs, she had said, even when it feels like you have none. Now, she says your name again, and it washes over you then rescinds like the tide.

Out loud, you say, “I remember,” though you can’t imagine how you’ll go back to caring about math and spelling exams. “It was years for me,” you say, picking at the soft skin of your thumb where a thick callus should be. “But only seconds here. Is that better or worse?”

“Better,” Ma says. “Less questions. From other people, anyway. One summer, I was gone for a month—”

“I know,” you say, and before you left, you wouldn’t have dreamed of interrupting her. But you can’t stand to hear the same stories again, and it’s been a small lifetime since you were that quiet girl. “I know all your stories.”

“Oh,” Ma says, then slumps in her chair. She runs a hand through her curly hair, then her fingers flutter in her lap like she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Anyway, it’s easier in some ways. Everything stays exactly as you left it.”

You don’t ask how she coped with being back because even now, sixteen years after she stumbled out of the portal for the last time, her eyes dart across the room, looking for signs, looking for that shimmer.

“Do you think they missed me?” she asks, unable to help herself.

“I missed you,” you say.

She looks at you—really looks at you—and you reach across the table. Your hand finds hers.

Days pass like a leaking faucet. You want to go back, but you’re not sure where. To Kapulinan, maybe, because there are people waiting for you, people who need you, and somewhere in the underground tunnels, Princess Mirasol holds a scroll inked with her father’s blood that could end the whole war. At night, you whisper spells instead of prayers, and you sleep on the floor to pretend you’re still traveling, tracing where your scars should be. After you dove into the portal, you spent your whole time in Kapulinan wishing you were home, the weight of responsibility never falling quite right on your shoulders. You weren’t as clever as your mother, or as kind. You certainly weren’t as brave. But you tried. And there were things you loved beneath the fear—your precariously lopsided birthday cake when Emil’s fierce skill with a blade and carving through enemies didn’t translate to competency in the kitchen despite his enthusiasm; Glisteria’s silly songs about quasi-native Maharlikan paintings being etched with shit; the knowing looks you’d share with Kiko whenever Vina and Sabel bickered about chores, leaning in so close to each other that their shoulders would brush. You weren’t ready for the end.

And you aren’t ready for a restart either. Home is exactly as you left it, and you’re beginning to realize that’s part of the problem. You remembered some of the details, but you’ve forgotten how to exist here—how to iron the pleats in your plaid uniform skirt for school next week and not remember the stink of burning hair in the remains of a razed village; how to start an application for a student driver’s license when your limbs still ache with the memory of how it felt to be splintered and reshaped into something that fit a Maharlikan narrative; how to care about college review centers when you know the sound a person makes when you slide a knife into their back, that hiccupping gasp as you drive the air from their body. Your room is too small. Your skin chafes against your bones. You choke on all this sameness.

Maybe you want to go back to a time instead of a place, but even Kapulinan doesn’t have that kind of magic. It’s easier to say what you don’t want: you don’t want to be here. When you look in the mirror, you search for the girl who fit this body, but you think you’ve lost her between worlds.

When you walk into the kitchen, Ma watches you closely, starved for information but trying so hard not to push. Every morning, she makes you your favorite—a bowl of chicken rice porridge dusted with scallions and fried garlic, rich with the bite of ginger. Two halves of a hardboiled egg floating in the arroz caldo stare up at you.

Ma pretends to nurse a cup of coffee as she sits across from you. Behind her hangs her painting of a Kapulinan summer festival. You used to hate that painting, but now it fills you with a feeling you can’t name. The sunlight plays off the glass frame, and it almost looks like a shimmer.

And Ma has that look in her eyes again, the one that tells you she’s not really here with you. You could talk about anything, and Ma would find a way to bring the conversation back to Kapulinan. It would’ve made you tense up with resentment once. A part of you still aches, remembering all those bitten-off stories about school or your favorite video game, barely started and interrupted. But now you soften in understanding because you’re thinking of everyone you left behind in Kapulinan too, and you know how for Ma, talking about Kapulinan is like letting a wound breathe. You decide to give her the grace of not having to ask again.

“I arrived right when you left,” you say, drowning the egg slices. Ma’s grip on her mug tightens, and you don’t dare look up at her. “But I was there for years. I don’t—I don’t know how long. Time… it isn’t the same. But you know that. And the war—the war,” your voice sticks. You shove a too-hot spoonful of arroz caldo in your mouth and scald your tongue. Ma nods and waits, as patient as she can bear to be. After you swallow, you say, “Princess Mirasol misses you. She just received her Warrior’s Mark. She wanted you to see it.”

Ma laughs, but there’s no humor to it, and it scrapes against her throat. “A Warrior’s Mark! That’s—that’s supposed to be a rite of passage, a coming of age. Mira. God! She can’t be older than twenty-one, then. Twenty-one! And I’m—I’m so old now. When did I get so old?” She glares at the back of her hands and rubs the skin until it’s red. You push your food around, and she presses the heel of her palms into her eyes. “Why didn’t it come back for me?” she eventually asks, and her voice is childishly small.

“I don’t know,” you say, “I’m sorry. I don’t know.” You study the water-stained floor so you don’t have to see her in pain. “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with you. Maybe… the portal doesn’t even choose. You said it yourself. Kapulinan just needs someone. It didn’t have to be you.”

“But I want it to be me,” Ma says, curling in on herself like burning paper. “I want Kapulinan to need me. Like it used to. When the portal comes back—”

“It took sixteen years last time,” you say, something hot flashing in your chest as you push your breakfast away and struggle to keep your voice level. “Are you really going to wait another sixteen?”

“I—wouldn’t you?” Ma says, face flushed. “Don’t you want to go back?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“How can it not?”

“Because you want it. Because it’s all you’ve ever wanted. The portal only admits one, remember?”

Ma looks away. “That’s not the point.”

“It’s always been the point. And even if it wasn’t, I won’t wait for it. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to become you!” You inhale sharply like that would take the words back, and your shoulders hunch as if to hide from your own admission. Ma’s eyes well with angry tears. You trace an apology onto the tabletop. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did.”

You did, but you don’t say that, and you wish you could drown in the weight of your silence.

“Do you think I like waiting? That I like being stuck in this damn house?” Ma takes a ragged breath. “This isn’t how the story was supposed to go.”

“Ma—”

“And I wouldn’t have to wait if you didn’t take it away again!”

You rear back. You can feel yourself blinking too fast. “What do you mean again? When was the first time?”

Ma’s lips press into a thin line as she swipes at her eyes. Under the fluorescent kitchen lights, you realize some strands of her hair have begun to shine silver. “Nothing. Just go to your room,” she says. She won’t look at you. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“No,” you say, “I want to hear you say it.”

The chair screeches as Ma stands to her full height, scowling. You struggle to reconcile her with the laughing heroine in Princess Mirasol’s stories, with the woman who used to plan elaborate scavenger hunts for your birthday and sneak you chocolate cake for breakfast. Instead, you are reminded of the moments you try not think about—the harshness in Ma’s voice when you would pull her out of her daydreams so she could take you to school; Ma screeching at eight-year-old you when you tripped and accidentally ruined one of her paintings; her tearing apart your room on one of her bad days, desperately searching for signs of the portal as you cried for her to stop. But this time, you do not wilt, and you match her scowl with your own.

“Say it,” you insist.

“No,” Ma says. “Enough! I told you to go to your room!”

You almost laugh because you have led armies and buried friends and used a dull knife to dissect a dead man’s intestines for an iron key. There is very little from your old life that can scare you now.

But you’ll admit there are some things. You haven’t lost the knack for pretending to be braver than you are, and a part of you isn’t really ready to hear the actual words yet, to hear how your mother never really wanted you when she was seventeen, and maybe not even after; how you were your mother’s failed attempt at proving she wasn’t in love with a girl; how she secretly thought your birth took the portal away because you were the thing that changed her from hero to mother, and mothers are never the heroes of portal stories. You know she loves you, but you also know she would choose the portal over you. You are not ready to hear her say you were never a choice.

You push your chair back and leave the table. You think of saying something smart, but Ma puts cling wrap on your bowl and places it in the fridge. You watch the way her hands tremble. You let her have the last word.

When you first stumbled through the portal, Princess Mirasol held a knife to your throat. She looked exactly like you expected with her sad eyes and long dark hair, a silvery scar running down her cheek like a tear. Ma learned to paint just to capture her from memory.

From the princess’s perspective, your mother had fallen into the water and you had clambered out. She thought it was a trick, that you were an imperfectly remade copy by a Maharlikan. Your mother wasn’t the first through the portal, but she was the only hero Princess Mirasol had ever known.

“We thought she was the exception. The elders said she had been granted entrance more often than anyone who came before her,” the princess told you eventually, a rawness to her voice. “Why wouldn’t the portal let Anna stay?” She had looked at you then, eyes full of an emotion you couldn’t name, and though she was kinder than she let on, you doubt she ever fully forgave you for not having the answer.

You find yourself asking the same question every night before you fall asleep, and you dream of wise women reshaped until they were bisected, bones sharpening until they ruptured from their skin; of villagers after a siege, left with nothing but bodies to bury. In your sleep, you scratch the spot Princess Mirasol’s knife touched, and after a week, the skin on your neck is angry and raw, stinging from the summer sweat. When sleep evades you altogether, you lie awake wondering if you and Ma will ever learn to fully forgive each other as you wait for the sun to rise.

Your body decides to move before your mind catches up, and there’s some comfort in leaning into the forward momentum. Everything happened so quickly in Kapulinan—reaction over action, action before logic. Your feet carry you to your mother’s painting of Kapulinan in the kitchen. You’re not surprised to find that Ma is already there.

How many times had you found her like this before, staring with the lights off? How many times have you stood there next to her, asking her to tell you about Kapulinan until she was too tired to bat away your attempts to pull her away?

You take a step and fall into habit. You open your mouth to speak, but Ma beats you to it.

“Can you tell me about yourself?” she asks.

You blink, uncomprehending. “You want me to tell you about my time in Kapulinan?” you ask.

“No. Yes. Sort of,” Ma says, and makes a helpless gesture with her hands as she looks at you from the corner of her eye. “I’m not ready to give up on Kapulinan yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. But when you got back, I shouldn’t have been asking about what happened to Kapulinan. I should’ve asked what happened to you.”

You shrug and lean against the dining room table, overwhelmed and tired and unsure of how to answer. You fan yourself with the collar of your t-shirt as you think, the painting of Kapulinan looming before you. There is too much you have forgotten, and too much that you remember, and too many things you know too well and not well enough. If magic and the world are built on stories, you don’t know where to start, and you certainly can’t see the end. The hard plastic of the table digs into the small of your back, and somehow, that grounds you. Finally, you say, “A spirit stole my name.”

“Do you want it back?” she asks.

Do you? You think about the person who dove into the portal and the person who came back. There is a part of you that will never leave Kapulinan, and that fact comforts you and horrifies you in equal measure. What would it mean to remain nameless? What would it be like to remake and reshape yourself? Slowly, you shake your head.

Ma nods like she understands, and you realize she is probably the only person in the world who can. You don’t know what to say next, so you don’t say anything as Ma perches herself on the table next to you. She doesn’t rush you out of your silence. You pattern your breathing after hers.

When the sun finally rises, Ma bumps her arm against yours and it rattles loose something fragile in your chest. She gets up and you follow. You peel garlic as she minces ginger.

“I missed you too,” she says later, as the arroz caldo cooks.

You huff a laugh, though it’s rusty. “You said it was only a few seconds for you. You probably didn’t even notice I was gone.”

“Of course I did,” Ma says, and you don’t know if it’s true, if it’s an apology, if it’s an olive branch. But for the first time in your life, you see her—really see her—and understanding isn’t quite forgiveness, but for now, it’s a close thing.

When the food is ready, she ladles the rice porridge into two bowls and eats with you. You don’t talk about school or names or Kapulinan, and you don’t know why you start crying when your spoon scrapes against the bottom of your bowl. Across the table, Ma reaches for you. You look up. Her hand finds yours.