Do you think if a man tried hard enough, he could remember what it is like to be dirt? Some evenings, this is all I attempt to do. Fashion the shape of our forefather as he was formed from the ground, using my mind’s eye. Peer into the velvety darkness, mouth it softly: man.

“Then the LORD GOD [...] breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Genesis 2:7 (NIV)

It returns to me in fragments. Whisks of grass tickling my ankle. Sunlight on the skin. Mouthfuls of fresh air. A river, splintering into four headwaters. Pishon, winding through Havilah, and all its baskets of gold. Gihon, cutting through Cush. Tigris, running along the east side of Ashur. And the Euphrates. Then the [LORD GOD] took [me] and placed [me] in the garden, commanding [me] to eat from any tree in the garden, but not from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for [I] would surely die.

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.

Joining the swim team is one of the better choices I’ve made. My coach declares that swimming is a lifetime sport. It’s something most people well into their senior years could still do. There is something about this that strikes me — a life spent with water, how gently it holds you. I imagine everything I have not experienced, everything I have yet to endure. Sometimes it makes me cry.

Last night, I whet my tongue using a shard of flint. I held my soft flesh beneath the pale moonlight. Have you ever stuck your hand into a tuft of blades? There are secrets in that iron foliage. This too is a way to keep the blood where it belongs.

The [body] is a different matter — which I ruined when I didn’t mean to ruin anything at all. Someone hurt me once and the wound still lives inside me, turned into an arm’s length of water, a stream of shame.

I was cast as the Cowardly Lion for the school play. While painting my face today, Sierra asked if I shaved. I nodded sheepishly.

“Really?” she said. “I think you’re the only guy in our class who does.”

I laughed and shook my head. “No, others do, too.”

“Oh,” she said. “I guess I haven’t noticed.”

“Maybe it’s a guy thing,” I explained. “We probably notice faster than girls do.”

I think of you landlocked and lost in another element — your body. This is months before I meet Jacob, who notices everything. Now I’m walking through Brooklyn and I’m not sure what I was made for. Little baldy in the city of vampires. I’m tired of being brave.

It happened the way you’d expect it to. A group of guys dared each other to trade cellphones and message random girls from school. Shave your legs!! or send nudes ;) or whatever else high school boys think is okay to say.

The girl sitting behind me in social studies doesn’t show up for a week.

(very true) rumors start circulating that [redacted] has a huge dick. I think about all the times I’ve stood naked in the locker room, still wet from the shower, and blinked into my reflection, foggy with heat. This body turns itself into a mirror and this too is a poem. Five years later, I feel the cool linen on my skin, rub my hands between my thighs, listen to crickets chirp beyond my bedroom window. How could I ever give myself away?

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.

After school, my coach says we’ll be practicing diving and timing our laps. I kneel at the edge of the pool and feel my spine stretch within me. This body turns itself into a song and this too is survival. At the shrill of the whistle, I glide into the water and draw a deep breath. The air surges inside my lungs.

In the car, my mother explains that the LORD GOD made man and woman separate. And although she doesn’t say so, I hear: so you should act like it.

But if I’m supposed to follow what I’ve seen, then I should stumble into the backdoor at 4 am, get caught with my hand between a girl’s legs, and pretend I was never gone.

I should be twice divorced.

I should have babies overseas.

I should call my kuya pussy, selfish, yellow-bellied, everything I could never be.

I should tell my friends how big [redacted]’s boobs are, fistbump my bro in the hallway, toss my head back and say, “it’s all good, it’s all good.”

Where does a boy come from? What is my body now? I met a boy once who said he was never the daughter his parents wanted. The body he wants to finish with is not the one he was given. It’s [springtime] now and when you lower your head it’s as if it still hasn’t rained in [New York]. Everything seems lit up but there are no people. And when it is dark at night will I still look blue to you? You’re holding me, but you’re not calling me cute, or handsome, or sexy, you’re calling me beautiful. I’m warm. We’re close enough to exchange breaths. I can see where your eyeliner smudges. Then we’re kissing, kissing, kissing the way foam embraces the shore.

Some people believe our body replaces itself every seven to ten years. So how long do I have until my cells shed and forget the taste of your mouth? When do I become something new?

(a list of things i can be:

peach, held up to the light. birdsong.

early morning. hope. goodbye. water.

son.)

I’m 21 and thinking about Jacob again, the depth between us. I’m re-reading our letters where I say, we are beautiful people, so by default we are attracted to sad things. I used to think this is why we are friends. But I was wrong, Jacob. We are friends because we’ve created language out of darkness. We are friends because we’ve taken our sorrow and spun it into gold. We are friends because I’m sitting in the car, and the world is ending, and I feel like a terrible person, but my brother reaches out and says, “(I am not ashamed / to admit it: / I love you / the way water loves.) Kuya is always here.” Then I’m home again, and I’m sobbing, and everything is new.

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.

The old Kabisayaan would take only as much as the earth offered. Cut the mangrove if absolutely necessary. Skin the animal and leave nothing behind. We are alive in our hunger, and the body wants what it wants, I know. So when I call you tomorrow, eat me like I am fallen fruit. Carve me from the inside out. Keep my hair and save my teeth, continue biting until you scrape the husk. Leave my bones in the sun, write me into a song. Transform me into a holy place.

I will never make that horizon if I stop looking back from where I came. So I hope Brooklyn will treat me kindly. I hope to call my kuya on the weekends and ask, “kamusta kayo dyan?”

I hope to stretch my legs out on Sunday night, call this body fully rendered, utterly unflinching, softly violent, completely mine.

I hope to remember my progenitor, and the earth from which he was molded, and mouth it again: man.

(it will no longer be a question.

i will know that i have loved.)

My coach stops the timer just as I burst out of the water. I was flight. I was breath. And I was boy.

* * *

Notes:

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan — A Filipino proverb meaning “He who does not look back from where he came will never reach his destination”

Kuya — ‘older brother’

Kabisayaan — the Visayan Islands and its peoples

Kamusta kayo dyan — “how are you there?”

Text is lifted or modified from Genesis 2, “06/09/2019” by Vans Bano, “Gift, 2” by J. Neil C. Garcia, and Pasadena, Baby by Junior Clemons