POEM · REFERENCE SYSTEMS AND BELONGING
They called me the black sheep as though there were one pasture. As though one fence surrounded every life. As though difference were a color the flock could see. I have entered rooms where I was ordinary. Rooms where I was difficult. Rooms where I was counted but not imagined. Rooms where two true things about me could not be true at the same time. The room solved this by choosing one. I remained both. Nothing happened to my body. This should have taught me earlier: a person can change position without moving. Center. Edge. Member. Exception. Sometimes these are facts about the person. Sometimes they are facts about the room. The trouble is knowing which. I have been wrong at the edge. I have mistaken exclusion for evidence. I have called distance perspective because distance was what I had. I have called loneliness independence after independence was the only country that would take me. I have called a wound a window. Sometimes it became one. That is not the same thing. A border may be invented and still stop a body. A category may be incomplete and still decide who enters, who inherits, who can make a claim, whose injury has a name. So I do not want a world without names. Names remember. They gather what happened to whom. They let the disappeared be counted. They let strangers find one another and say: this happened to us. But every name has an appetite. First it points. Then it explains. Then it begins to believe it has found the whole person. Every useful category dreams eventually of becoming a verdict. This is how a description becomes a room and the room forgets it has a door. Some people enter a category and disappear inside it. Recognized enough to be counted, not recognized enough to change what the count means. Some must become exceptional before they are permitted to be ordinary. Some spend a life translating themselves into words that were not built with them in mind. Translation can be love. Translation can be survival. Translation can become the slow instruction to disappear. Refusal has dangers too. I know the pleasure of becoming illegible. No one can reduce what no one is allowed to read. But no one can know it either. And a self that cannot be corrected has become another closed system. So I have needed one sentence more than all the others: You may be right about what I did and wrong about what I am. I have needed its opposite too: You may be wrong about what I am and right about what I did. There is more freedom in those sentences than in innocence. They let the judgment remain local. They keep an error from becoming an identity. They keep an identity from becoming an alibi. Now when a room calls me difficult I want to know what happened. When it calls me different I want to know from what. When it says not one of us I want to know what the us was built to protect. When it says wrong I want to know whether it means cruel, false, careless, or simply unfamiliar. These questions do not place me above the room. That was another error. Seeing a border does not mean you understand the country. Standing outside does not make the inside small. Pain can sharpen attention. It can also narrow it. No position comes with wisdom. No exclusion comes with innocence. No belonging comes with truth. A person may stand at the center of one world, at the edge of another, outside a third, and beyond the imagination of a fourth without moving an inch. The body remains. The geometries change. And still the geometries matter. They open doors. They close them. They decide who must explain themselves and who receives the ordinary mercy of arriving without explanation. This is why I will not burn the categories. And why I will not kneel to them. I want the harder thing: to belong without being completed. To be corrected without being reduced. To translate without disappearing. To refuse without making refusal a throne. To let another person know something true about me without handing them the authority to know the whole. And to grant myself no greater authority. I am not asking to live beyond names. I am asking every name to know where it ends. And I am asking the same of myself.