Hermosillo

The day after the arithmetic, they explained the rest of it to me, and that’s the day I went all the way down.

I thought I’d understood the debt. I’d done the math, seen the hole, even felt a little clever for seeing it. But there was a floor under the floor, and they showed it to me flat, the dull man and his notebook, no heat, the way they showed everything. The harm done to me on the road, the void, the part I won’t give you, the part I climbed up out of the dark missing on purpose, that wasn’t, like I’d let myself believe at the very start, some terrible thing I was getting through to pay down what I owed. It was the opposite. They’d decided it was a service. To me. A thing provided. So it went in the book too, on my side of the book, as more that I owed, an ongoing obligation, a charge that would keep coming as long as I kept breathing.

Sit with that, the way they made me sit with it. Everything that got taken from me, they’d re-entered in their book as a thing given to me, on credit, with interest. The breaking was billable. The more I got broken, the more I owed for the privilege of being broken. There was no act in the world that could move the number toward zero, because the very things I might’ve called payment, they’d already claimed as new debt. The hole had no bottom because they’d built the bottom to drop away faster than I could ever reach it. Forever. Until I died. And honestly they’d probably have found a way to bill that too.

That’s the no-exit. Not a locked door. A locked door you can at least throw yourself at. This was worse. This was finding out there was no door at all, that the whole idea of a door, of an after, of an even-someday, was a thing they let me carry so I’d keep walking, and now that I’d walked all the way to the desert’s edge they could afford to take it, because there was nowhere left for me to walk to anyway.

I stopped, that day. Not my body. My body kept on, faithful, stupid, hungry, alive, doing its loud work in the heat that came hard through the high barred window. But the part of me that had been moving forward toward something just stopped moving, because there was nothing to move toward, and I sat in that stopped place and felt the whole weight of it come down, and I’m not going to lie to you and say I didn’t want, in that hour, to just not be anymore. I was seventeen and they’d shown me a math with no version of me free in it, and the wanting-to-stop was honest and I’m not ashamed of it. A person can only carry so much, and they’d loaded me past it on purpose, and something in me lay down.

But here’s what I found on the floor, and it’s the whole reason this Note exists and isn’t just a girl giving up. When everything you were moving toward is gone, you find out what you’re made of underneath the moving. And what I was made of, all the way at the bottom, under the gratitude they trained and the hope they used as a leash and the numb I built to live, was a cold flat no that didn’t need a door to exist. It didn’t need an after. Didn’t need to win. It only needed to be the thing that didn’t agree. They could own my body and my time and my work and write my breaking into their book as profit. They could not make me agree. The cold line that did the arithmetic was still there at the bottom, and it looked at the no-exit, and it didn’t despair, because despair’s for people who still wanted the door. It just went colder, and harder, and finally, all the way, into hate. Not loud. Not yet. A pilot light. A thing kept burning low for later.

I didn’t climb back up out of despair at Hermosillo. I went through the floor of it and found rage on the other side, waiting, patient, mine, the one thing on the whole road that was all the way mine. I didn’t know yet it would get somewhere to go. All I knew was I’d carry it the rest of the way, the way I carried the mark on my wrist, except the mark was theirs and the rage was not. The rage was the first thing in a long time nobody handed me, and nobody could take, and nobody was ever going to get to put in their book.