from the frontier

passport.

Some places you visit, even when you thought you were going somewhere else, don’t disappear once you leave but become bigger in your wake. More defined. But before that can happen, you have to figure out where you are. You have to know something you didn’t know about where you were coming from in the first place. At the threshold, which can be as simple as a door, you walk in as one person and out as another - maybe this happens in a day, perhaps a lifetime - you are beginning again. Luna says she likes being new at places, and I understand. Having switched schools more times than fingers on both hands, I get it. Because when you are new, anything is possible. But that means anything, and I’m realizing that whether it’s true or not, anything is ok as long as it resembles something we hoped it would be. Before we got here, this was a story about getting better. But I see now this is a story about understanding what that word even means. Perhaps it means finding a new word to make a home out of. A shelter made of new materials. They can be beautiful in their own way, but they may not be what we think. Before, this was a story about going somewhere for something to happen and then returning after the happening with it having happened. Maybe in an ancient version of this story, we set out on horses to cross faraway lands for a tonic to cure his illness. Or maybe there is no tonic, and that’s where the story ends. Coming home was a threshold crossing. Unexpected. I am arriving somewhere and leaving at the same time. Here’s the thing: I thought I was walking through a door, but I stepped into a tunnel. I keep trying to come home, but in the middle, where it’s hard to see, there’s no way to know which way will take me there. My mind tells me to leave for somewhere else. Just find a doorway and walk through it. Let it eventually lead to places where I can stay and sit for a while, catch my breath, and breathe in the newness. But this isn’t about newness or betterness. This is about trust. And if trust were a map, only the eye behind the eye can follow the veins home. I keep waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I wonder if I may need a visa to return home because I am a foreigner. I recognize this is a privilege. I’ve never really needed a visa, though I did have to get my passport stamped every three months when I lived in another country and was living somewhere without a visa. I would walk across a dilapidated bridge the length of a football field, hungover to oblivion. I would scrape together money from various odd jobs. I still keep memories of this time like Polaroids stacked in a little drawer in my mind. I let time change the story. Sometimes it’s glorious. Sometimes it’s a nightmare. How everything I do right now seems to be a remaking—a rehoming. Everything seems unfamiliar. On the drive to camp today, whose bus stop happens to be in the parking lot of the girl’s school, which makes the morning drive the very same as the one we do all school year long, I apologize to the girls for being grumpy and tired. We three are holding time in our hands like little golden suns. Somewhere else, it’s winter, which would make more sense. Because this is not just any summer; it’s the summer that sat like a mountain in the middle of the year we talked about climbing for months. A mountain, in theory, is one you can reach the top of and then have an easier time coming back down. I have to understand now that this mountain metaphor is not ours. I want to talk to them candidly about all that is happening at once, but I also know this isn’t fair or appropriate, so I tell them how much I missed them when we were apart, so much my body ached. I couldn’t wait to be back together, and in that fantasy, we would have so much fun once we were home, but then we washed up onto this strange shore shipwrecked, tired, a little bit broken. I don’t intend to stay this way, but I’m unsure which shape I am becoming. The tunnel has no mirrors and no light, so I suppose if I keep taking small steps ahead, I will find out eventually. I bring everything in my body, my travel companion, collecting stamps from all these places. I’ll look back and know them by their name one day. But for now, I’m a tourist, letting this new terrain roll out behind me.