Adoptee is a word that sounds unfinished.

The long double ee sound resonates against the hard palate inside the pink, ridged cave of the mouth, the tongue lying down, the tip touching the back of the bottom front teeth, the jaws slightly open, the lips apart. The skull vibrates for just a moment after the sound itself is gone.

It is a word that refers to a permanent exchange; it refers to the choice of the adopter; it defines the adoptee as an artifact, something created by will. Or force. Or chance. Or inevitability.

The Big Bang. Matter exploding and each particle drifting away from one another. A family as triangle. Drifting lines. This [mother-father-child] triangle will never be reassembled. All of these ghostly relationships.

“How can I heal if I can’t feel time?” ponders Leonard Shelby in the Christopher Nolan neo-noir film Memento. Shelby has anterograde amnesia, which means he is unable to make new memories and retain them. He remembers everything up to the concussion and traumatic event, or so he claims.

We are all time travelers. We travel at the speed of one hour every hour, one year every year. The light we see from the sun is eight minutes old. We are bathed in, we live from, energy coming to us from the past.

We need more than eight minutes to get back to our body before it was a body, when it was our origin. We think that if we keep trying to get closer and closer to those non-memories that we will go back in time and change the course of events.

But there’s nothing but blankness.

A kind of blackness that fades outward but has a sound. It has the sound of a wall, a thick wall, and we can hear muffled voices on the other side. They are so close, if only they knew we were here, in this room.

The foreigner is a “symptom” (Danièle Lochak): psychologically he signifies the difficulty we have of living as an other and with others; politically, he underscores the limits of nation-states and of the national political conscience that characterizes them and that we have all deeply interiorized to the point of considering it normal that there are foreigners, that is, people who do not have the same rights as we do.

—Julia Kristeva, “By What Right Are You a Foreigner?” Strangers to Ourselves

I have been a stranger here in my own land: All my life.

—Antigone, Antigone by Sophocles

The Error of Blood Relation

The Error of Blood Relation

—based on “Antigone’s Nature” by William Robert

Where is this criminal?

Brother, cadaver

across her mortal limits

and the terrain of the impossible

we can follow her strange latitudes

Why doesn’t she fly?

Antigone, sister-daughter

the uncradled, the unbride

bear her name

tame her, dazzling this line of sight

Were we born to love?

flight through the palace, an arrow through Ismene