​

 

Slower slower slower. You can’t move fast at 14,000 feet.

stop, sit, breathe.

He carried my camera, my suitcase.

nine hours was the exchange for 36 minutes in the salar.

 

He found obsidian. three pieces gifted. Do you know what this means? I asked. Suddenly I am 7 years old and I remember.

 

How I designed the green room with two shades merging into one. How I didn’t like it. How my skill did not match my vision.

How in the final moments I decided against my own design.

 

Let that one sink in.

 

Redo. Reboot. Repaint. I demanded it. He has never not done what I have asked, and still, it took me trying to prove he was the villain for me to realize I was wrong.

 

When I left home I remembered loneliness.

 

And not the kind of lonely like

I miss my friends or I’m homesick

 

Not the kind of loneliness

that has anything to do with sadness. No.

 

I mean loneliness like emptiness

Like absence

Like void

 

The kind of lonely that

meets me in transition

that is too big for my body

That echoes from asylums not mine

but near

 

Grasping

falling

Oh my god, the fear

Alma’s fear

 

fracture.

 

but fracture is not separation

Like a mirror in the dark

I see no thing

Am I even real?

Breathe

 

If I am a grain of sand

then I am the whole dune

and if I hold still

I might just feel her pulse

 

Pulse.

 

So yes, I remember loneliness

I remember my naked body pressed

against the wood floor

Air so thick you had to eat it to breathe

The sting of my sweat

dripping from my brow into my eye

Am I crying from pain or from sorrow?

 

Here they are one in the same

Here I am returning

Again and again and again

Until I remember loneliness. That I am no thing.

And I am not your Lifeforce.

 

My mother is sad. Get a grip I say. Grow up. Be a grown woman. I am tired of raising you. I am tired of this game, of this realm. I cannot love you if you need me. To need is a slippery slope. Do you understand what I mean when I say that? There is nothing I love so much that I wouldn’t leave when the exchange begins to taste like rot.

 

When the coffee tree died I raised my hands in surrender. Once upon a time I thought it would save me. 10 years. 10. Everything I own is stained in coffee. Everything I touched was a bargain. Salvation is hell and I was buried alive.

 

Cover me with cascara then. At least let me ferment in the cravings of my own skin. My belly burns. Am I bleeding again? drink more water, he said. But the blood. Blood. What about the blood?

 

I think in the other life I did die. I think we all do. When vision clips, your pillars fall. am I the blind walking with the dead or the dead walking with the blind?

 

But here I am with two hands that look ancient. Naked on the forest floor, seeking swords.

 

Ghost dirt alien. Human.

 

I am new here. I haven’t stopped crying since I returned. For who or what, it doesn’t matter. The salted air reminds me of why I arrived in the first place.

 

for a moment I felt myself growing old. If that is true then let it be with a woman. And if the lump in my breast is a vestige of avoidance then cut it out. Cut it off. Take them both.

 

The mothers, grandmothers, aunties. They don’t have to scream or spook or scare me into being. Not anymore. I speak to the dead and their voices are getting louder.

 

13 generations. I reached my hand into the belly of the deepest gut. These are not my memories except that they are. Gifts are dropping from the sky now and for once I am not hungry. For once I am not angry.

 

For once I see that I always had a choice and I can end the bloodline

 

Maybe I am just a flower. Here to pour my blood into the garden. Spit on the bugs that eat my petals. Drink the poison of my own making. Make medicine of my own poison.

 

I am a flower and I can end the bloodline.