PROLOGUE

I traveled twenty-six thousand miles, around the world by ship, looping around continents and islands, across the international date line and the equator, the world made both bigger and smaller at once by this journey. My life split into a before and after in these months. My imagination could never have conjured such a voyage. If I thought of the world beyond my life at all, I thought of danger. I thought of loss. Loss of bodily autonomy, loss of all one might need to survive. I did not picture myself, mile after mile, foreign lands layered by more foreign lands where even the color of the earth and the shape of the trees were revelations to me. Where language itself meant more than simply communicating, could mean life or death, freedom or prison. One night, I lay on the deck of the ship, on a pillow I had carried from my cabin, huddling with a small group of new friends, to watch the stars, to sleep under moonlight. By day, the sea was a deep indigo blue all the way to the horizon. I knew because I spent hours in a crevice on the starboard side of an upper deck, swinging my legs over the side of the ship, watching the water ribbon as we sliced through it. But at night, it was a black, broiling thing, alive and terrifying and beautiful.

The stars were so bright our faces appeared as if spotlighted on the deck. Days earlier, when we had sailed from Kenya to South Africa, the ship’s loudspeakers had boomed “Southern Cross” by Crosby, Stills & Nash as we passed over the equator and we hugged everyone in our midst, knowing that to travel such distances meant the people we were becoming were not the same ones who’d be returning home. We held a ceremony reminiscent of the navy’s when one transformed from a pollywog to a shellback (meaning to cross the equator). One man wore a wig of seaweed and carried a trident. Our metamorphosis was complete when we kissed the body of a dead fish.

On this night, though, close to the end of our journey, we wanted to stay up and watch the stars. My friends and I lay on our backs talking, telling stories, promising as one does in her youth to never lose touch. We watched the sky, no light pollution from land for thousands of miles around us, and the stars were as voluminous as raindrops, in enormous, garish swaths of cottony white. So many they appeared like clouds stitched with silver sparkles. We were sailors. We were explorers. We were navigators, cruising by celestial bodies, wanting to hold onto the ancient belief that stars were fixed and only people moved.

I had left my home months earlier. Or, rather, my most recent apartment. But home? The last stable place I’d lived had been during my childhood, back when my family, my friends, my community were all intact and my mother was still alive. Since then, how many times had I moved? Thirty? Forty? So many years when I held everything I owned in the trunk of my car, digging for my work uniform from a trash bag, covering the beloved stereo I had nowhere to plug in. Couches and floors, motel beds and car seats. I had been out in the world then, too, on those nights, but it hadn’t been this world. It hadn’t held any promise at all. I knew, because I had been terrified to board this ship—built for the Korean War but repurposed for passengers—yet made myself do it anyway, knew that however vague my future looked—and it looked plenty vague, still—it was this idea of promise that I’d hold. This sense of possibility.

As we lay on our backs, light began to break along the horizon, and the overhead sky appeared to begin to cleave in half. Night on one side, dawn on the other. It was like a perfect seam down the sky. We couldn’t believe what was in front of us. We whispered. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Can this really be happening? Because even the visual evidence didn’t seem enough. Day and night so clearly sharing the sky. A vertical vein from horizon to horizon threading right down the middle. Even as I watched it, it seemed impossible that it was real. Dozens of us witnessed the sky slowly, almost imperceptibly, folding itself in half, then in half again, the dark side eventually giving way to the light, the ocean rushing loudly as it carried us along. This night, this moment would come to me over and over through the years and then the decades. I would question my memory, think it couldn’t have been as I recall it. A track right down the sky. But the vision was so clear in my mind, so unshakable.

I know now that science has a name for that line—dawn in half the sky, darkness in the other. The Terminator. Sometimes it’s also called the Gray Area, or even the Twilight Zone. It’s a fuzzy line, because sunlight bends around the earth. I like to think to the earth now. But it does not exist in equal proportion to the darkness. That is to say that the world is not half in dark, half in light. It’s because of that bend, the earth’s diameter. It turns out that sunlight covers a greater area of earth than darkness.

Science explained the celestial vision I saw that night, but memory makes it a miracle. I wouldn’t understand for years still, but that line was a kind of beginning, a reset. A visual demarcation of my own metamorphosis. That line is my origin story.