Greiby Janáky Cornejo Medina is Honduran born, transracial, transnational adoptee whose story moves from Tamara's prison walls to Queens, Long Island and Portland, Maine classrooms. An adoptee of many languages and two spines. I carry my mother on my back.
Author’s Note / Submission Statement
The River Remembers is creative nonfiction told through Afro-Indigenous cosmology, where land, river, and sky carry ancestral memory. The piece reimagines estrangement as the distance between elements, the space left when a mother dies and her child is taken across water. My mother’s death in Honduras, and my adoption while she was imprisoned, becomes ecological grief; the Earth mourning its own separations. Through the transformations of Land to shoes to sky, this piece traces how love persists and insists to be present even after death and how estrangement becomes climate, not conclusion. The River Remembers redefines estrangement, not just as emotional distance, but as separation across time, body, and nature while giving the mother full, vivid humanity beyond trauma. It captures the adoptee experience of being everywhere and nowhere at once with artistry, honesty, and a healing power that feels organic rather than redemptive: love as weather, still here, still moving.
i envy rivers. molecules run through me, and still i get to hold her reflection.
i honour rivers for their patience, for the way they carry both memory and decay.
i am the land, and i remember her: a woman moving through san pedro sula’s morning heat, fruit balanced on her hip, shoes thin as paper. her hands smell of soap water and guava skin. the buses cough, the vendors sing prices, dogs circle the market’s dust. she sells until her voice frays, until the coins in her palm are enough to buy one meal, a little shade. she sleeps wherever walls forget to end. night after night i feel her heartbeat through the soil, and then one night it cracks the sky. lightning spills over tamara’s walls; a child’s cry answers. no record keeps what i keep. the guards look away, but i hear it all: the rush of new breath,
the silence that follows, the river outside straining
to hold
both.
lungs filled again with water and wind.
she was only thirty-three when her body, blistered blue, returned to me.
even copernicus could have predicted it: two celestial bodies orbiting each other so astonishingly. i was born within
her clouds of dust.
bone-blue, i blister in her memory, the ficklest of friends. my heart swells, pulsing with the siren of our tethered love. her eyes—vivid, blazing, evening-star-blue—it’s you, it’s you-you: it’s u. u are all that i experience. u are me, too. aren’t you?
supernova, white-hot, starburst and unshell, shockwave purple—she holds me with abandon until we collapse into the genesis of a new day.
and they remember us from the soft canvas of a cyrielle gulacsy painting. i think that’s what our love could have been. i think our story should have been longer. i think so. what do you think?
days return, and with them the smell of diesel, rain, fruit beginning to rot. a little girl’s hand clutches her mother’s skirt. i’m not being stolen, she repeats to herself, to me, to anyone listening. papers wave like frightened birds. a taxi opens its mouth. the child steps inside. i rain hard, but rain cannot rewrite what men have signed.
in another country, the girl is given shoes.
first belonging she can touch. she cleans them, lines them by her bed so they can see the sunrise. she dreams of hands lifting fruit, of market dust, of rain that smells like home. when she wakes, the shoes are still there, but her heart is missing. it hovers, looking for soil.
years unfold like wet clothes hung to dry. she learns the grammar of abundance: how to carry too much without dropping what is sacred. closets tower with shoes, each pair a story of absence turned tangible. she looks at them as if they breathe. sometimes she whispers to them: don’t forget where you came from.
i have not forgotten. i am the land that raised her mother, that cradles her name in clay. estrangement is what forms when a body crosses water but its spirit stays behind; it is the space between river and sky, between the taken and the one who still waits.
Sky closes her eyes, and the girl looks up.
A song perched in her throat - a hummingbird lost in its own echo. her heart warbles with sadness, the way a honduran wine-throated hummingbird might sing after a storm. she feeds on the nectar beneath the trees i once shaded; her small sapphire of life soaks the sun. she carries the sidereal day inside her chest. she is spring budding blue. she is ocean, crashing, crescendo blue. the moonflower waltzes in; the wind kisses her feathers. she falls into half moon bay, the water ink-black and endless. to my mother, she whispers, do you love that we share the same sky? and the sky answers, i do. again and again,
i do.
she hears that voice and follows it through daydream and nightdream, crossing the threshold between what breathes and what remembers. she feels the warmth of light spilling from the sun, a cascade toppling toward freedom. she knows her mother could not be all she was meant to be, but she still shines, made of light, guiding her home.
in sleep she drifts into arms of blue air. morning gallops through branches; palms pulse; the horizon hums. she dreams she is cloud and her mother is mountain. they hold each other, suspended between what was taken and what cannot be destroyed.
and i, the land, feel it. rain moves through me carrying both their names. it washes the market stalls, the cracked pavements, the roofs of san pedro sula, the hills of the west. each drop is a syllable of reunion.
the river remembers. the shoes keep watch. the sky carries them both.
when the horizon tilts just right, i see them reflected together-mother-daughter, river and cloud, two halves of the same weather.
Dignity Persevering Documentation. Photograph by Greiby Janáky Cornejo Medina. La Ceiba, Honduras.