Borders.

The river fractures a city grid. Calls them two countries. I have this river running under my ground - a wet map strung through every story I tell. It comes to the surface when watched, when prodded. It ventures out when called upon like a tilting ship, forking my tongue. Otherwise it just rests along the strings of my personal codes like a nesting bird.

I pay the toll and drive into the tunnel. Tunnel long and lights punctuate the enamel of the subway tile lined up like teeth. Me, a child peering out of one of the many gleaming white American sedans that belonged to the funeral fleet – my father the helmsman in any one of these borrowed cars. Cars borrowed from my father's legacy. I peer out one window and my brother out the other side, waiting in anticipation to see the sign with the two flags on it indicating a precise shift of countries that occurs under ground, under river, the very place where our heritage confuses itself and fractures our family's one world into two. Here is the line that allows and disallows entry to half of what makes me. The blood in my body knows that there was a time that my ancestors walked freely on either side of this river, no countries, and irritates me like a burr under my saddle. I wind my way through the tunnel, confronting the usual panic in the back of my throat as I near towards the exit. American Customs.



One can draw and trace a conceptual line through America's political transformation if they listen to the way in which this border crossing has changed through my lifetime. I remember my father getting the old tunnel tiles when they replaced them with new, glossy ones. Each tile told the story of car after car driving through this place, yellowing them like the ceiling of a lifetime smoker. My fathers was yellowed and rusted as if it sat under a joist that held up the structure under the river, but slowly leaked over time leaving a tiny trace of the river, the metal and a trace of time across object.