Crossing

There is a moment on a road like that when you cross a line on a map you cannot see and something closes behind you. I felt it. I could not have told you we had passed into Mexico, I did not know the country under my own feet anymore, but I felt the door shut at my back the way you feel a cellar door shut even when you did not see the hand that closed it. Guatemala was where my grandmother was. Whatever this was, it was not that anymore.

At home, in the village, what was happening to me had still felt like a thing that had gone wrong, an accident I had fallen into that could somehow still be set right. Crossing taught me better, because on the far side of that invisible line I saw the size of it. It was not an accident. It was a business, and it was vast, and it was patient, and it had buildings and vehicles and men who did this every day the way other men farm or drive a bus, without heat, without even hate, which was worse than hate. Hate I could have prayed against. You cannot pray against a payroll. I saw the scale of the thing that had me and I understood that no one was driving up the mountain to save me, because to the men who ran it there was nothing wrong to be saved from. There was only inventory, in transit, on schedule.

That was where I lost the last of the story I had been telling myself, the one about the girl on the other side with her own room and her envelope of money. I had stopped believing the work in the north was real work, but I had kept a smaller lie under it, that I would at least come out the far end as myself, dented maybe, but me, and able to go home. Crossing took that too. I understood there was no far end where I walked out and went home. There was only more road, and then whatever waited at the end of it, and home was a place on the wrong side of a door that had already shut.

My faith did not leave me. I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the story where most people expect me to say I stopped believing, and I did not, and the truth is stranger and harder than that. What happened is that my faith stopped being something I practiced and became something I held. At home it had been a thing I did, out loud, with my hands and my voice, candles and prayers and a flower at a saint’s feet. On the road it went down to one thing I gripped in the dark with no words at all, the way a drowning person grips whatever floats. I could not have told you what I still believed. I could only have shown you my hand, closed hard around it, refusing to open.

That is what I carried across the line into Mexico. Not the warm faith of the highlands, that was already mostly gone, prayed quiet and then prayed silent. Only the grip. Only the refusal to let the last of it go with everything else. They took the country, the name, the story, the voice. They did not get the hand. I crossed into the worst of it with my fist closed, and I want you to remember the fist, because what comes next is going to test how long a girl can hold something when she has no words left to hold it by.