Make money doing the work you believe in
Hermosillo
Isabella, where they told me what I was for. The eleventh of Eyes Open.
Hermosillo was three weeks of waiting, and waiting is its own kind of work, because the mind does not stop, the mind keeps doing the arithmetic even when the arithmetic only gets worse.
They put us in a house and the house had a number on everything, including me. This is where I learned what my debt actually was, which is to say, this is where I learned that the debt was never a number you could pay. I had thought, the way you think when you are still telling yourself stories, that there was a sum, that the favors and the passage added up to a figure and the figure could be reached and then you were done. In Hermosillo a man with a ledger explained, not unkindly, almost bored, that the figure had grown the whole way north, that transport costs money, that I had been eating, that everything I had traded so far was interest and the principal was still there and the principal, it turned out, was just me. The whole me. There was no number. There was only owing, forever, which is a thing they invented so that a person can be a permanent asset instead of a temporary purchase. I had negotiated so hard, way back at the start, for a good price. In Hermosillo I found out there had never been a price. There had only ever been a leash with no end of the rope.
And then, near the end of the three weeks, they told me what I was going to do at the border. Not asked. Told, the way you tell a mule its load. They were going to use me to carry product across, and they explained how, and I am not going to write the how, it lives behind one more shut door, but I will tell you that it was the moment I understood my body had finished being a thing they used and was about to become a thing they used to hold other things. A container. There is a difference and I felt it land. For years my body had been the merchandise. In Hermosillo I got promoted. My body became the truck.
I want to tell you I had some big feeling about that and I did not, and the not-having-it is the worst part, the part that tells you how far down I already was. I just filed it. Another fact, like sunlight burns and blood sustains, except I did not know those two yet, those were coming. I filed it the way I filed everything by then. Name it, hold it, do not let it move your face. The girl who had negotiated double a country ago, the one so proud of working the room, she was still in there, but she had gone quiet, because there was no room here to work, no man whose want she could turn, just a ledger with no bottom and a use being assigned to her insides. You cannot flirt with a debt that is designed never to close. You cannot charm the thing that has decided to make a suitcase of you. I had run out of road for my one trick a while back. Hermosillo was just where the road admitted it.
Three weeks. A calendar on the wall with nothing written on any of the days, because the days had stopped being the kind you mark. At the end of them they would load me and point me north, and I would go, because going was the only verb I had left. I sat in that house and did the arithmetic over and over, and every time it came out the same. I was not a girl with a debt. I was the collateral. I had been the collateral since a bored man closed a drawer in Tapachula. Hermosillo was just where they finally said it to my face, and where I finally, quietly, with no drama at all, believed them.
