HUNGER

The Vast Interior

Several years ago, I had an experience which profoundly altered the shape of my life. I was outside and I was weeping. It was springtime, the snow was melting. I was in the heart of the city. I was walking. I passed through a wide alley between a school and a church. In the middle of the alley I saw a dead bird—small, half rotten, imperfectly preserved. This dead thing, with its exposed bones and its eaten up body, transfixed me with its bareness, its innocence. I stood, arrested by it. An exchange began, and all at once the bird seemed suddenly to have my face. It was my body there, my soft flesh eaten up and fallen away. Those were my bones, my milk eyes, my wings flattened and turning to ground. That was me—small, still, and surrendered against the concrete at the start of spring. The ground fell out from under me and I fell through it. 

The falling was like tearing through a pinprick in fine fabric. And where the pinprick had once been, now was a vastness, an expanse, a canyon.  I walked into the vastness. All around me, the city shimmered and twinkled and called to me. The streets were full of people coming and going, arms and legs swinging, beating hearts moving through the city. I felt myself as them. Not among them or alongside them, but suffused in them—every boundary and border crossed, all the doors between us opened. What had stitched me to my body alone was undone. I was without form. I left one shore and swam to another. I was the land, wild with life and longing, streaked through with death and decay. Not a separate being in the world, but the world itself.

 This moment was as vivid as it was fleeting. It is the ghost which haunts my life and which remains just out of reach, passing just at the edge of my vision. It has become the singular inquiry to which I return again and again: what does it mean to belong to the world for a person like me? 

I am a Black woman. I have been shaped by beauty and by pain, by exaltation and by exclusion. In the midst of my own splendor, there is the lingering sense of being locked on the outside, pressed into the periphery of life. To maneuver these experiences is to walk the road between the living and the dead. Each day I choose life. I understand that I am what is missing. The world sings my name, and I insert myself into it.