People thought that you were native. You, with your long brown hair and your eyes that were almost amber in the dusk of the moss circle where we first kissed.
But amber is a warning light and I should have known.
They'd come up to you at the airport as you waited for me, drawn in by your quiet air. Or perhaps by your beauty. You always were the prettier of us two. I taught you how to notice the girls looking, casting stray glances in your direction, skimming over that face that was cast from some place log ago and lit with some fey light. Hard to know what you were in the end. Even now, thinking about you, I find it hard to remember your features exact. They swim under my gaze like the moon on water, reflected, then fractured and gone.
I taught you how to notice, I taught you how to be so self aware that you became like Adam, and I, Eve; proffering that fatal fruit.
I don't know if the Natives have a creation story, but I'm sure it isn't that. "Have you heard the one about the snake?" And maybe they'd laugh at the thought of it. That God, so beloved of his people, could cast them out of the garden of creation and into the cold because of what they knew. Because the symbol of feminine wizdom and fertility, the one that encircles the feet of Mary outside the churches of Latin America, persuaded them to open their eyes and draw breath for themselves. Unreal.
But that is exactly what happened. We came with our extraterrestrial god and threw it at the feet of the Natives, making them outcasts in their own land. What a snake meant to them was never the point. What it meant thereafter cut them off from their land, their gods, their very way of being. Funny what a language can do.
Your Mothers people were Polish, they themselves diaspora, and your Fathers from Scotland. Your Grandmother sailed over to Canada at just Nineteen and made her way down over the years to New York where she settled and married a man named Mr. Hoffman, a violent drunk by all accounts. Scottish.
These are the people you didn't care for much. Perhaps they were not authentic enough for you. You wore your hair long and went bare foot. Your clothes were woven hemp and you drank only green tea. You were an Accupuncturist, a herbalist, a writer, a digeridoo player. You smoked weed like it was something sacred. Pretending to yourself that wrapping it in yellow buddhist cloth made it somehow closer to god, closer to being an original. You never saw the irony. But then why would you? Herbs can be sacred. But who's god were you praying to?
You and I used what you knew about herbs once, a different kind of herb this time. A different kind of purpose. You used your healing skills in Accupuncture too, but not to heal me.
Black Cohosh, Wormwood, Carrot Seed, Penny Royal... I forget the rest.
My little native, a seed sown in foreign soil. Most of all I had no words for you. my unexpected stranger. Unwanted in the end.
