You always think you’ve made it past certain places in your life that like points on a grid, create lines deep inside you etched in skin, sweat and memory. Your being winds around the labyrinthian turns that you took for straight lines, endless and at times wide stretches of possibility that in fact could explain how curiousity killed the cat, simply by inviting him in towards his disbelief. And so I think about the imminent departures, the living out of a car, old childhood drawings locked up in basement storages deep under kitchen utensils, favorite books sold out of garages, family photos wrapped in blankets; I think of my wedding dress shrink wrapped for the next three years, frozen in time, grandpa’s gold watch unwound. In unburying I bury again, the journal from my childhood moving from town to town, the daughter of an immigrant, of a coyote, finding crevices to pour herself into, shadow puppet freedom. But that was then and yet it is now, now by choice, re-creating it with the pompousness of ostrich feathers at full bloom. Not I, this time. I find myself not alone in this recasting, more troubling in a way for the responsibility; I step into that terrain with husband in tow, to test the lines, like a spider’s silk fibers suspended above the earth. “Hay un precio para todo,” mi mama reminds me. There is a price for everything. “Everything?” I’d ask. “Sí, para todo.”
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