Can’t You Tell the Difference?
THE BORDER begins with the geometry of empty clothes. It begins in the neat perpendicular between the balled-up socks and undershirts, in the angles of folded underwear, in the parallel trenches between the pants and the shirts, into which you stuff unwrapped presents.
No need to gift-wrap anything.
The border is ugly.
Its barracks are the scenery of a dream that smudges the ink of your existence as you pass from one state of being to another.
“Passports.”
The border guards’ badly cut uniforms have elastic hems underneath their waists like maternity fashion.
This is the only elasticity; nothing bends into a different shape, nothing gives. It’s all concrete. The faces are concrete.
The border doesn’t begin in your suitcase—it begins in the three layers of your mind.
The loose, superficial layer that fools itself into thinking that it doesn’t care.
The porous layer beneath that hopes that no one notices that it does care.
The deepest and hardest layer, if set free by erosion, will bare the filigree fossils of your oldest fears. At the border, you become a child.
The state’s hands rummage through your planned parallels and hopeful perpendiculars.
You are naked.
Your mind will remember this nakedness wherever you go. It’s the skin underneath your skin.
Nothing is a matter of course. Everything is a matter of power.
WE SIT in the car and my mother hands my brother and me each a peeled egg. She boiled them late last night, four eggs banging against the blue pot.
Eggs are special. We only eat them on
