Our mother was captivated lately by the news story of a Colombian woman lost in the Amazon jungle for nearly forty days with her three children. The fruits they found had already been eaten by animals, so they dug for seeds and worms. By day, monkeys threw their shit at them. At night they covered in sticks and leaves, though rain still drenched them, sometimes flooding to their necks, and insects burrowed in their ears, noses, and eyes. The woman held her children close while creatures approached—owls, armadillos, snakes, maybe tapirs or animals whose names she didn’t even know. In the black jungle night, she couldn’t be sure. Once she heard an undeniable jaguar call and knew it could be their end. She prayed it wouldn’t track their scent and never heard it again. She believed the forest duende, said to be fond of mestizo children, made them get so lost they couldn’t find their own footprints and protected them now, though not from the ticks and maggots fattening on their blood that they pulled from their raw feet and open wounds. She told her story from a hospital in Putumayo, where she and her children were treated for hunger, dehydration, and parasites after an Indigenous fisherman saw them drinking water from a riverbank, thin as spirits, almost too weak to stand, as if the gentlest wave might sweep them away. Our mother seemed most affected that this woman had no idea hundreds of volunteers, police, and army helicopters upturned the jungle looking for them with no luck, that she and her children had traveled so far searching for a way out that they’d left the Colombian Amazonas and entered territory claimed by Peru, and once rescued, her husband confessed that with his family lost to the selva he’d already planned his suicide.

For months now, we’ve also seen news stories of other divided families, children separated from their parents at the southern border. I haven’t told anyone I dream of these children in particular, hear their cries, the eventual silence of capitulation, feel their ache of lost faith and unknowing. In my sleep, I am one of them. Our family didn’t cross any desert or river to get here. We came by plane with the right documents, now worthless. My life, like my sister’s and my brother’s, is a mishap, a side effect of our parents’ botched geographical experiment. I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. If the reason I have felt so out of place is because I, like the narco animals, have no biological or ancestral memory of this strange North American landscape or its furious seasons. These mountains and rivers are not mine. I haven’t yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer, or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum.

I looked over the bluff at the tidal ponds below and thought of lives lost to the crags and current. I clawed the rock I was sitting on, closed my eyes, felt wind scarf my neck, and imagined the feeling of hurling myself over.