VOLVIÉNDOME
Alaya Dawn Johnson
It’s different, every time I go back. The very familiarity makes it strange to me, as though I have fallen asleep to travel the old corridors of my half-forgotten childhood, where my friends and family and I slide into our grooves, side-by-side troughs in the sediment of the last thirty years, so deep that we can hardly see one another. But I am not asleep as I land in National (we old Washingtonians who remember our loyalties still refuse to use that bastard’s name). I am awake and my skin feels inside out, rasping like a hair shirt, as I step onto the gate bridge. The air is thick and sweet, the sun weak; I am stepping across a chasm, into another time, another life. I was born in DC, and I spent my twenties in New York, but five years ago I packed two suitcases and fled across the border. I remade myself: I learned Spanish, found kindred spirits among my fellow displaced, diasporic artists of Mexico City, entered a master’s program to sit with ancient texts in old languages and dream of the past. I liked so much of the person I was becoming that I began to flinch from the girl I had been. Her places were not my own.
And yet, I have landed. I try not to think about what I have come here to do. It’s an old trick: some decisions, however necessary, must be left to the edges of your thoughts until you have already jumped; then, they can be grieved.
I think of Mexico instead—evening downpours, the morning trash bell, atole and tamales for breakfast, the old sun, the burning eye. But everyone else wants to get off the plane; my past pushes me forward. It’s different every time I go back, but this feeling of being two in one, a snake required at regular intervals to slide back into a dry and raspy skin—this is the same.
It is—a kind of—home.
I was nineteen years old, about to go on my third date with an older man. He had convinced me to give him my email address at a political rally that I was covering for my university newspaper. He had said, “Do you want to have your most interesting interview of the night?” I was feeling both overwhelmed and beautiful. He was too old for me, thirty-six, but I told myself I didn’t care. At least he was interesting. He had a kind of totalizing presence that comforted me with its familiarity, even though I halfheartedly bit back. The grooves were already there; his genius had just been to find them and make himself at home. We went to the restaurants that he wanted, listened to the seventies bands that he liked, and he lectured me on the big-name leaders of the US political left that had been neglected in my Washington DC private school education: Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Eric Foner, Howard Zinn. A bunch of white men, but when I called him on it, he said, reprovingly, that no white man was more anti-racist than he was. Didn’t he love black women?
That afternoon, before the older man picked me up from in front of my dorm, my mother called me.
“I just wanted you to know that your father has decided to leave E—.”
“What do you mean, leave? As in, he no longer believes in our religion?”
“He’s had a series of revelations. And he’s decided that while it has many good elements, it isn’t the true path.”
“So, he just, what, raised us to believe in this not-true path for the last nineteen years, and now he’s like, whoops, my mistake? Was he planning to tell me this?”
“I’m sure your father wants to talk to you about his next steps. He is using his spiritual tools to create a new path.”
“He’s starting his own religion?”
“It isn’t a religion. It’s a spiritual path to higher consciousness.”
I must have said something. I must have said goodbye. The words of my childhood had softened and then rotted in my mouth. I had been struggling with my faith for the last year; I had left the holy book on my shelf where it seemed to glow with the toxic shame of my inadequacy, of my obstinate need to judge its contents and find them not just unbelievable, but offensive. Dad had told me that I was just too spiritually underdeveloped, that the brilliance of the text would make itself clear to me as I surrendered myself to God and our spiritual leader.
The god and spiritual leader that he had apparently decided were a big lie about two weeks ago. Only now had my mother bothered to tell me. Dad had been the highest-ranking Spiritual Aide in the region when we were growing up. He would wake us up at five in the morning every weekday for prayer services before school. He would criticize our spiritual development, our inability to fully practice the doctrine.
I told the older man on our date. I made it a joke. “Can you believe that my mom called just to casually inform me that my dad left his cult—the one he raised us in—to found his own? So, I guess I’ve lost my religion?”
He told me that he was agnostic. I liked the sound of that. I didn’t want to hear another word about my spiritual goddamn development for the rest of my life, I decided it that very night. We went to some East Village concert, in some bar where they ought to have ID’d me but the older man convinced the bouncer I had left mine behind. He was charming, practiced, persuasive in his conviction to get whatever he wanted. It was a familiar dynamic, but more pleasant: what
