9d • Orientation
My Story
Before I had language for what I was, I had a tricycle and a cry from out of view as my cat died.
I did not see the death. I heard it — one sound, complete, carrying everything that had happened in it. And I knew. Not as conclusion. Not as inference. As arrival. The knowing came the way the cry did: whole, unbidden, already true before I had turned toward it.
My mother came to shield me.
I understood, even then, that what she was shielding me from was not the death. The death I had already received. She was shielding me from what she imagined the death would do to a child — and I felt, without words for the feeling, that the map she was offering did not match the territory I was already standing in.
I did not resist her. I received her too.
That is perhaps the first thing to know about me: I have rarely been where others assumed I was. And I have rarely corrected them. Not from concealment — from a recognition, older than I had any right to have, that the distance between where they thought I stood and where I actually stood was not a problem to solve. It was simply the shape of things.
I was already learning that silence has meaning. That a cry from out of view carries more than sound. That love sometimes shields, and that being shielded is not the same as being protected.
I was already, without knowing its name, standing at the threshold.
I have been standing here ever since.
More to follow. This is only the first light.
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My Story
