léni de la brisa

Misalignment upon entry
by léni de la brisa

It was what everyone believed to be a proper birth: from the place where cloudless skies consummate unyielding days with hot dust and cedar pollen, where cicadas and crows die and live in an endless rhythm, I arose with tomorrow’s sun and fell into my body.

I don’t think I was shown the proper way.
I don’t know how to be in this body.
I must not have done it right.
I don’t know how to be here.

I must have fallen into my body at the wrong time, the wrong angle, or used the wrong amount of pressure. For I have been in a state of misalignment. Not quite right, but not quite wrong.

I don’t know how long it’s been. Is it possible to be lost in between? To feel both places so distant you exist in a third unknown place? But it’s not so bad here.

And it’s all the same, really, when you live on the edge of everything and nothing. Every moment is tarnished from exposure to your absence. And when the end arrives, it was only the beginning that came up to greet you from the horizon, an old friend, it smiles at you, one everlasting moment from beginning to end to beginning.

And in this long moment, sadness and wonder emerge from somewhere inside of you until you are overcome and overfilled, they spill out of you and surround you. Within and without—this twisted dance of chaos and love—until you are one with pain and laughter and they have become you. And where do they end and you begin?

I don’t know a damn thing. I don’t know how to be and how to not be.

And, all at once, here I am and here I’m not.