I think about smacking my lips. I protest silently instead, leaving the rope she bought for me on the sidewalk, knowing it is vulnerable to the wind. Who is she? Will I ever find out? The roses planted in front of the house the old woman always dreamed of calling her own are being ripped from the ground, along with some planted basil and the dandelion weeds I give her for the dinner table on Sundays. Tiny, fast-moving black ants disperse and swirl because the wind has demolished their sand castles. I hope more don’t come out of the ground and start biting my legs because they are now like all the grown-ups I’ve known, furious they have worked so hard for nothing. I ignore the gusty currents of dust and open my mouth to taste the dirt. Then I catch my old woman a rose as it shoots past like a kamikaze. My palm closes around a menacing thorn. I walk up to the dull, leaning, one-story yellow house with the flower in my hand and a little blood running down my wrist. Behind me, I see a rusted chain-link fence with circles like a honeycomb. I imagine bees on their way to sting me, then I hear the bark of a big dog coming from somewhere inside. But I’m not afraid of any of this. People are the only things which disturb me. I don’t like when this woman twists her mouth at me, like she’s wondering why she ever liked me in the first place. I want to make her happy. I want her to think I can live forever, rise in smoke if I was burned and not even hundred-mile-per-hour winds are strong enough to carry away my ashes. So I don’t cry although it hurts. Instead, I hold up my hand and say, “Ma’am, look at me. Now, I’m just like Jesus.” And I really wanted to be.

For as long as I had known of myself, earlier than this dream vision of a blustery day that hasn’t happened yet, I was a dark soul floating through the arcane, craving the journey of birth, fashioning a life from God-given visions and my own make-believe. From the forever sleep I’ve awakened, in many times and many places, only to be forced to close my eyes and simply wait, forever and again. It was 1992 when it seemed ready to happen for sure, in a winter on the cusp of millenniums, in a no-name Pennsylvania town on the road from Chicago to New York City, when a girl named Shivana Golding fell in love with a boy who was not my father. She was strong enough to conjure the courage to embark on a quest less hopeless than being a magical but completely invisible Black girl on a crowded street in Chicago. She was fifteen, already aching for a purposeful life: to be a mother was a calling.