Becoming is Returning

Yesterday was my birthday. I have a hard time around this day for various, deeply personal reasons. It’s a rather new experience for me, feeling this way. I used to enjoy my birthday, up until perhaps four years ago. One year my birthday became a day I wished no one, including myself, knew about. A few days before this birthday I rummaged through some of my many documents of old writings on my computer. I was looking for my voice from a time before these feelings arrived. What follows is what I found.


What if aging is not a solidifying of one’s self? What if “getting our life together” is an illusion sold to us by systems that would die if we didn’t? What if aging is less a process of individual togetherness, less of concretization, but one of disintegration? Look how our skin loosens itself from the taut restraints of youth, yearning towards earth, towards lover. Feel how the minerals in our bones long to feel the heavy reunion with ancestors, with stone, who in turn long for them, for us. Notice how, as you age, your identity, that little daimon, outgrows the boundaries of one body. Notice how it grows restless, promiscuous, how it desires to play with something and everything beyond the edges of self before one night, it doesn’t come home at all.

I held a belief, a hope, that at a certain age I would know who I am. This was that age. Only, the ‘I’ I imagined to meet is not at all who appeared. I expected a woman, clear as a cloudless night, constant and traceable as the pilgrimage of stars. What arrived was something else altogether.

Enter,

the shape shifter.

Skin shedder, lightning breather.
I am hoof print in the silt, spider’s silk,
and the icy western wind that bites the skin.
I am my mother’s love,
my father’s protection,
my beloved’s heartbeat,
and my dog’s devotion.
I am pine bending with the storm,
I am blood in the mosquito’s belly,

I am the bloated fox on the side of the road who will not make it home to her children tonight.
I am the wood I burn, the home I tend, the forest I bow to.
I am the flower I trample,
the flower I plant,
the animal I ate,
the painful memory for an unknown number of persons.
Heretic and hierophant.
I am an amorphous heap of feelings, of senses, of visions.
I am murky.
I am changeling.
I am animal.
I am rhizome-
an iteration, a ripple.
I am scathed, touched, haunted.

Becoming is returning.

I am returning.

Slowly,
I am returning.