The next generation maybe straddles the gap, until something cracks, and becomes doubly bad, non-lingual, doubly alone. Or it grinds twice as hard, expands the business, buys the carport, gets the medical degree. Even if they do break through the layer of stone, these children of the crossing, drop out, choose with their hearts, like Ma did, like the Tarantula did, in their separate ways, it’s there: the drive to work. The brutal momentum of the stone—onward and upward, an impulse stunted and turned inwards, to be something, to return a profit on investment. That generation is still paying for the crossing.

Then comes the third generation. The fruit of the whole thing. Why be satisfied as a doctor, a lawyer, when you can be a dramatist? A bassoonist? A geologist. The third generation can afford to do without financial return, compelled to realize what’s inside themselves, to ship their spirit over too and call it self-actualization. Their roots quiver and search, carrying the dead particles of another soil.

The third generation is a size too small; it’s utterly cool and culture-free, or it’s half home, half poorly spoken, 56making an identity for itself in the furrow ploughed by the stone, bearing the moment of its blood’s arrival like a tattoo on its forehead, but in pen, self-drawn, and speaking its name proudly among foreigners, low-voiced among countrymen.

Generation little-me, myself-alone. Generation neithernor. The third generation is invisible, theoretical, assuming its skin matches the wallpaper—and it knows it, or it doesn’t know it, but it carries the crossing within it like a loss.

You could see it like this:

The suicide holiday is the antithesis of migration.

I thought more about it as I sat on a rock in the grass nearby. Above the village, beneath the undeveloped land on the mountain. The suicide holiday as descendant’s revenge. To be so ungrateful, to shake off the generations, past and future, to not fulfil oneself, not have children, to simply go on strike; let’s sneak out of this party and shrug, there at the finishing line before the mythical, entirely-at-home and therefore non-existent fourth generation.

The thought struck me with a sweetness, a fury. I could walk up into the mountain, up into the clouds, fall somewhere, break my neck, vanish out of my coat, my layer of fat, my lungs, into the moss. I could let the mountain take me, oversweep me with grass, overtread me with stone, and be enfolded in the ground below, its grey-brown arms of lava, its legs; I would be dissolved, melted down into the 57fibres of the moss. What remained of me would end at the beginning, nullify the outpouring of energy, the will, the stone’s brutal path, be stone-in-stone.

By the time I got back, the house had settled for the night.