True-True
Your number is called, or you think it is, but you try to not let on that your French is rusty as you head toward the counter, and while you’re rehearsing in your mind a natural “Bonjour”, an impatient, fluorescent light lit “Oui Madame…” beats you to setting the tone, and inspires nervousness that severs your sentences into sudden, singular French words, and your face heats as you realize your attempt to say “finish application”, “in person”, maybe came out as “utilizing, one final person”, and the worker shifts, brushing her bangs away with a pen, now understanding what she needs to about you, and you see her see you as suddenly not from here, and while you know it’s true-true to her, it is only partially true to you, and reviewing your application that confirms to her that you are an American applying for a Canadian Passport, as a citizen born outside the country, as a citizen that has never lived in the country, she brisks to English and says, “mmm…no guarantor listed…” so you explain you “...thought a passport agent could be…” and she puts the pen down, saying ”non, if you are born outside Canada to a Canadian parent, you must find your own Canadian to vouch for you”, and in a sigh of pretending to be helpful, “...maybe your Canadian mother??…”, but like she almost doesn’t believe you even have one, which is also only partially true, and in front of her you silently re-experience your mother as dead, saying only to the worker “ok”, but what you really mean is, do you believe that you can be of a place even if you are not from a place, and that your mother was your country, and that your mother’s mother is Canada, not the drunk mother who ruptured her from the beating breast of Canada’s open-hearted sky, to make money in a glove factory in the Central Leatherstocking Region of NY for flat rum cokes, and that you didn’t realize until coming to Nova Scotia last year with what was left of her, for your very first time and her first time since she was ripped apart from here, that for your life you felt the song of this place in the etchings of your bones, which you now know is actually an ancient song played from the record of her heart, and how amethyst dripping to an ancient metronome, pouring in time out of Fundy’s upper cliffs, as flora pressed itself into a ferned lace of fossils beneath, that the lace also webbed to her, and how this is also your placenta, and only then, with your body humming this place, did you finally feel your whole self, reborn with her, as you freed her ashes back to the fresh and beating heart of the open salt-swept Maritime skies while remembering yourself back into the being of all it, and seeing now your mother’s plan for herself, for you, of how to do the impossible and comfort your heart grieving her?
