Roots and Hypocrisy: Becoming Grounded in the Span of One Breath

Isla sucked in a ragged breath and squeezed her eyes shut. Her auntie’s words washed over her; “I love the feeling of a thought not yet formed. Like opposing sides of a magnet drawing nearer and nearer. I can feel the frustration of my ignorance, but even stronger is the sensation that soon one magnet will flip and a new whole will materialize.” Then her auntie would launch into the familiar monologue; how far the internet has taken us from understanding she would sigh. She liked to call it” internet digging” not internet searching she would say with the same unwavering pride she always did, searching Isla’s face for recognition of her genius. She was so tired of this digging practice she said. People dig only until their shovel touches something satisfying; and then they say well, I’ve gotten what I want from this hole. Then they turn their back on it and refuse to read anymore. 

She dug her numb toes into the sand and reached her swollen arms to the sky. She had felt so far from the earth since her aunt died. So far it had been three years since she had returned to the valley. She was keenly aware that needles were covering her body, and yet the fabric of the very air she breathed seemed suddenly loose and malleable in a way it had never felt before. She felt the weight of a magnet that would never bring this fragmented puzzle together. It pressed so hard on her lungs, that they seemed to creek as she sucked in the thin trail of delicious air. 

In that moment, the canyon she had walked for so many years began to fill with water. It was a shallow creek and a deep chasame. It was sliced by the foaming foaming water of a river forcing through rock, digging a bed for each anguished molecule despite the fact that few would rest there. On the valley floor dry stumps are hollow. Their charred bark reaches up like wiry hair, turned skyward like a dark shock. It is a dry anxious vestibule, flies only beginning to caress that stiff charcoal hair; it’s pomade of dust so thick the air is frosty with it. There are lush ferns and calm eddies of mossy water, where lily pads come to dock. It is also the barren bedrock of a fresh planet void of all life. Isla felt oxygen finally reaching her brain as she let time here unspool to a point all these moments share.

She had wanted to grow roots since before she can remember. She knew she had roots, little baby ones on the soles of her feet waiting for soft soil and water and time to wrap around them firmly and gently; but that had not happened yet because since before she could remember Isla had been uprooting herself over and over again. The moment her roots settled they would be jerked back up in the fresh air. The longer they spent up-rooted like that, the more anxious Isla became that their growth might become permanently stunned. It was at this moment that she realized that her own mother’s lofty nature might be due to the fact that her roots had completely died and dried up. 

Suddenly dozens of dreams were floating back to her. Dreams in which tiny dead clusters of roots would break away from her mother’s toes without her noticing until she began to float away. Isla would scream and chase after her and beg her to come back, but her mother just stared straight ahead, as if she had already forgotten she had belonged to the earth, but had not yet realized she was in the sky. 

Isla felt the length of this breath stretching out before her. We used to like being bored, she thought. We acknowledged its catilization of creativity. Boredom 

lets our brain crinkle in new places. She thought of her crinkled brain drawing up a hard clay face, a face drooping with tears, it’s blue lips drawn in an eerie smile. She loved to draw this face, not to give, not to frame, but for the simple pleasure of running the lead over paper. She thought of her auntie; “clicks and infinite networks have replaced boredom” she would say, “how can we live in a world here we have the option to never be bored.” Isla traced the paths she had been walking; stretching up for a yoga pose with no intention of truly meditating, arranging a salad for a photo with no joy in tasting the leaves. Boredom begets internal connection, she thought, it is the realization of intersectionality, the cultivation of vulnerability. She is new, fresh, piercing honesty. She is a painful pinprick of undeniable regret. She runs raw the relationship we have with ourselves, until our nerves are sweet with the honey of forgiveness. She reminds us of moments we have not relieved in a very long time. But, Isla thought, if we strip her of this negative connotation she is freedom to be with ourselves.

The air had almost filled her, but then came the crushing awareness of her own journey through a culture so far separated from the life and death that existed simultaneously in the valley. Laughter bubbling in her throat at the thought of this linear ideology so far removed from anything natural. And it was laughter because along this search for achievement, success and efficiency that marked the legacy of capitalism and white supremacy, came the silliest notion of all. A notion that made her want to laugh in a place even deeper than her belly: the search to be original. Beyond this construct of individuality which leads girls to the bathroom to throw up their meals and hums to us softly as we close our eyes against the constant blinding light of systemic oppression, is a ravenous search for something so fresh, something that will set us free. Something which will allow us to ignore our history, to forgo reparations, and to finally move forward. 

Raising her leadened arms to the sky Isla was not sure which was more hilarious; the frantic imagery of the search itself, or the irony that it’s ideology was the very root of the culture it sought to upend. The magnet had pulled these puzzle pieces together at long last, and yet not a single one seemed to sit flush with its neighbor. When she could not hold that bubbling friction of joy and hypocrisy in her lungs any longer, she opened her parched lips, and let it tumble out.