In the small hours of my childhood, I discovered I was not fixed. I could place myself in the interval between lightning and thunder, in the back of a throat before a name is spoken, in the second before impact, in where God might inhabit when He is not being believed in. I told my mother I once put myself in her dead mother's womb. She asked me to describe it.

I used to slip into things the way absence takes the shape of what it replaced. The body of a sparrow on the ledge: hollow-boned, heart like a struck match. The astronaut above the earth's blue curve, watching the line where day forgets it is day. The first sailor to see land after months of sea, beneath the relief of it, the self that had organised itself around the waiting, now obsolete. The body having learned to expect horizon, now confronted with the solid world as a kind of interruption. To enter a thing was to be altered by it without explanation. To carry its specific gravity back into your own life and register the displacement. Certain knowledge does not arrive. It surfaces. It was always there, submerged, waiting for the conditions to change.

There is something that happens when you practice this long enough. The borders go soft. You forget which hunger is yours, which grief, which particular longing that rises on certain evenings. You look down at your hands mid-sentence and they seem like objects someone left behind, objects you have agreed to manage for the time being. I spent years wearing other people's textures, other people's specific weight of sky, stepping into sorrow that did not originate in me and letting it reshape my interior anyway. I thought this was love. I thought this was the work. I did not yet understand that you can give yourself away in increments too small to notice until the sum of them is most of you, until you reach for the edges of yourself and find them already belonging to someone else's story.

My grandmother's womb before my mother was a thought. Before she was tissue or name or the particular shape of stubbornness she carried into every room was a country I invented and then could not leave. Something anterior to language, to the naming of things, to the long argument between self and world that constitutes a life. Some proof that I existed before I existed, that I was present at the source and not simply downstream, not simply the residue of decisions made in rooms I was never in. I don't know what I was looking for in that dark. I don't know what any of us are looking for when we press ourselves against the boundaries of what is possible and push.

The world eventually insists on location. It gives you a body and means it solemnly. But in the small hours still, the walls turn permeable. I find myself in the throat of a bell before it's struck, in the pause inside a wave before it breaks, in the dark of a woman I never met who carried in her body the person who would carry me. I am not haunting these places. I am being reinstated. The distinction matters, though I cannot prove it to anyone who would ask. Something about the quality of the dark. How it already knows what you cannot describe.