The Prologue

I am the daughter of a tribe who traded their truth for a desert god — 

who sacrificed their violins and brushes at the altar of a man who promised to give them heaven in the place of art. 

I am the granddaughter of a woman who believed the man who told her it was her skin that took her son, and a veiled life that would bring him back. 

I belong to a tribe that once belonged to the sea 

but by the time I arrived, the boat had been sold and replaced with a forgetting so profound they’d forgotten what it was they had buried— and where. 

I am a prisoner of a tribe that silently begged for their freedom in the children they birthed, but when those children tried to show them the way to that freedom, they wanted them gone 

I’ve tried to rewrite every line of who I am to fit into the script of who they are, or, who they chose to become. 

I tried to be good. I tried to swim against the tide of the waters I was born into, against their river, against my own. But the water was wild with rage from the long line of our betrayal — I stopped trying to swim and found more mercy in the drowning. 

My family, near and extended, those who erased their art and the few that kept their pencils and brushes — they all belonged to the same thing. And though I tried so hard to rewrite the truth, I’ve always known, from my first day on earth, that I was destined for exile. 

I remember lifting these young eyes to look into the bare faces of the family I was born into. I remember knowing before I wanted to know that this wasn’t going to end well, and that the only thing I could do to prevent that was to bury who I was.

And I did. I did. I tried death, but even death exiled me.

So I packed my bags and left. I drove the long highways and slept in countries where no one knew my name. I got out of their way. I gave them the gift of my absence, and the gift of my silence. 

To survive, I lived for many years on the bread of my lies. I swore that when I looked in me, I saw none of them. I believed in the god of miles and gasoline — I believed in the mirage of distance. I washed my father’s face in the cold bleach of my heart, pretended there wasn’t love, there wasn’t death, there wasn’t horror. 

I stopped at every curved back boarding a train — mistaking them all for my father. When you run, what you run from multiplies in the bodies around you. When you hide, what you hide from raises its volume in the silence within you. 

***

Of all the trains, there will be your last and you will not know it’s your last when you take it. In its final mile, your body opens to the truth. 

This desire to ‘make it out’ — this illusive, subliminal begging that urged you to run — was quietly walking you the long roundabout way to your death. Life, as you find out, was lying all this time, so inconveniently in the face of the father. In stillness, it chases you. In stepping towards what you’ve always wanted to leave, it finally leaves you. 

The day I stumbled on any real freedom was the day I tripped over the loose laces of my father’s broken walk — in me. When I arranged and rearranged the room because there was something in life that wanted my touch and I wanted it gone, I felt the breath of my grandmother’s denial — in me. When a group of women sat together in the garden, laughing, drinking under the moon and I sat by my desk, listening to them from the open window, I heard my grandfather’s death before his death — in me. 

Alone, I sat with them all. Miles away. In their life and in their deaths. 

And when I was ready, to return to the world with this new truth, this real freedom, I walked down to the garden, followed the voices into the clearing under the moon. Prepared to end this exile, I arrived into the absence of what had passed before I was ready ... 

Without the safe bread of my lies, I reached with open hands to the orange of another life, and began to peel it slowly.