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I
This morning I thought how easy it must have been for you to have copied your genetic code in the form of flesh, dated randomly on that bleak day in December when the light had the dull luster of pewter and the blinds had to be drawn.
The day ended my tenancy in the womb which you otherwise ripped out of your daily planner, and being the unwanted, the mistake, had given up in offering like the body and blood of Christ.
Every day I struggled to carry the weight of a lesson, a refugee of abandonment, reading through the pages of Catechism books just before the Crucifixion, practicing forgiveness.
Now, I must live with the side effects of an uncommon childhood like an addiction: a returned identity card, the genetic code lost in the blood of the unborn― those blueprints of family history that build the strong bones of a monument, revised by the thin scrawl of your signature on a line that forever divides.
II
If to gaze into that mirror as though the glass is convex― if we could first look inward, then outward―
if we could study profile like the face of a moon in each of its phases― would we find our identity?
How much of you would I see at each angle― full, half, quartered― that I would not have seen in the mirror handed me had its glass not been convex?
What do I know of you in my arched brow? In the discharged turmoil of my eye? In a single gesture?
What do I know in learning to give up, give back, give away, that I would not have known had I been of the same will?
III
I cannot find you down those stairways that lead into the deepest catacombs of family history, buried treasure,
a chest sealed years ago in the shadow of your footprints; in the dust of light beams through the windows in the hall of records.
Nor can I see you in the genetic code that cannot be deciphered― those diseases that will torment the blood, and in the pain that encapsules our time-released lives―
although that is where I will find you.
Joanne Monte
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