Borderline: Growing Up on the Verge of Okay

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Day 1 - March 23, 2023

“What I am doing here?” I ask myself. Answer: leaning over from a gut punch that had me chasing the bathroom. No. Not quite right. Is there such thing as a gut pull—something remaining unknown, that pulls hard from the center of you, all crampy? 

That’s how I feel when, for a reason I don’t yet understand, I drive through my childhood neighborhood, to the house where I lived an entire 8 years (the longest I lived anywhere before this age of 53) and the place just before, the location of first memories. Maybe that’s the reason I’ve found myself searching the soil here. Maybe I’m trying to understand that early wholeness. What did it look like and smell like before the pre-teen years of crumbling family edifices and filthy floors? This is where it happened—those dream-like memories that have become my touchstones. Not really memories even, more like ghosts that I’ve come to count on, that have said to me “We were with you there”. 

Was I actually here? Is there any evidence that my body wandered these streets and grasses, came in for supper and went back out to dig holes between the weeds of a sandy Florida yard? I am fascinated by this idea—that when nothing else records the soul and moments and body of us—the soil does. Right? We live in a universe where matter cannot be destroyed. The implications of that: there is evidence of every single one of us in the places we’ve been. We are literally buried in the layers of soil—little deaths and little recordings of who we were—like snake skins. 

So, if that’s true, and we find ourselves drawn back to a place by the gut, wanting to catch a glimpse of the little girl before brokenness, what is it we’re being called to? I keep driving around searching. Will someone report me as a stalker? I keep wondering how many of these trees witnessed that girl. Were any of them here when she existed? I keep lamenting a lack of orientation to the land that would have told me, that would have taught me to memorize every tree and shrub so I would know.

But, trees and shrubs are the least of it—this lack of orientation to the physical world, the places that hold my skin, the places that played with that little girl who was whole, who reached up from the sand and said “I’ll trade molecules with you. Let me teach you which berries to eat.” 

The first 12 years of my life were spent nestled between the capillaries of water, bayous and streams and creeks that surrounded us like veins, a life-force that defined every terrestrial animal, every bird, every grass and every flower. Never more than 5 American football fields away, sometimes less than one— lived a bayou I never knew was there.

It’s one thing to live on a shore, you know? It’s another to live on it and not know that you do. Why didn’t that little girl know? How was this shore part of her world, how did it seep into her skin and bones and heart? How did it define her God? How many of her cells went floating out to sea, when she traded them with the soil, not knowing they would wash away so close, run themselves into the bamboo reeds of a bayou beach, nest there with birds she never learned about. And, what’s more—what didn’t she understand about the experience of this bayou, how that has seeped into her bones?

Can we find our old selves on stake out, on the land where we lived and learned? That land that mothered our earliest selves? I grew up on the borderline of water and land, on a thin line—one asphalt road between poverty and security, on the grey line of functioning and pathology. I’ve come back to that place to accomplish one thing: to watch and learn about what happens here, to remember and honor the girl who I was, to learn from the land and the sea and the shore, what happened on the borderline of things. I’ve come for the soil and the air and the clouds to tell me the story of myself—because I believe they can.

There’s so much of me buried in the layers of this place. Today is the day I begin digging.