Makeshift Medicine Line

I had asked you once, when your obvious return still felt like an inevitability, if you’d regretted it, leaving so soon. By that point, your re-entry into the only country you’d ever known was the natural plot point mapped out on the horizon of our story, before my own compass nodded northward, and you’d sunken further south. You’d refused to see it as anything more than a re-routing to the citizenship that had always remained at the end of an eternal last step that seemed to stretch the timeline out further. I just have to do it—it’s the last step. I’ve waited my entire life for this.

By month two, we’d learn to stop volleying the future between us as if we could still trust ourselves to catch it in our hands. Now, half a year later into this last step, we have hardly brought it up at all. Instead, you have worked steadily to resurrect your father’s old home, tending to its cracking foundation, fixing water leaks, replacing crumbling tiles. You have long stopped studying for the pharmaceutical re-licensing exam, the one you’d first earned as the previous election snuffed out the New Year’s fireworks. You’ve swapped HIPPA training and medication flashcards for Spanish, drawing toward other bilingual speakers who’ve bonded over communicating better in one language, but still dreaming in another.

Still, I couldn’t help ask—on days it was harder to pretend you were still in Albuquerque—do you regret it? Your answer, with every month, varies. In December, your voice only manages to shiver into the phone, I regretted it the second I felt the border fence behind me. I’d come home right now if I could.

By inauguration day, your laugh is weak with relief. With all this happening now, I think I left at the right time. If nothing else, it got the wolf off my back.

By March, I’d trail behind Chris La Tray, memoirist of Becoming Little Shell—as he lectured to author’s events and ballrooms. Tracking his speeches with my pen, I’d notice the few base elements he kept close: he’d fought for recognition for the Little Shell tribe, he’d always wanted to be a rock star, but accidentally became a writer. He’d call out, we didn’t cross the border. It crossed us, that medicine line.

Though this wasn’t the first time I’d hear it, it was the first time I felt a quiet shifting from the forty-ninth parallel—as if it that medicine knew where to re-direct, an antidote reacting to poison. After, I slipped into plant medicine seminars. Take this, someone said, slipping a branch in my palm. It’s bitter, though. As I’d bitten into the wood, I was no longer alone in an unknown city. Here, I am ten, learning to swallow bitter medicine under the haloed light of our hogan. There, I will taste how healing can be both bitter and sweet and—somewhere on the other side of that makeshift medicine line—I know you are, too.

Brianna G. Reed is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts.