Urdu: Jibillat
Meaning: Instinct, Connature
Where does one begin again? I suppose one begins at the beginning, a circuitous path back to the place where it all started, a retracing of steps, a reliving of memory, an unlearning and relearning coupled together.
-x-
My father and I. Circa 1993 or thereabouts.
My father steeped me in his image. He showed me I came from him and his people and some of those people I learned about from his stories and fables. We have more than blood binding us, he taught me. Some of his connatural craft flowed through time and knotted itself somewhere inside my ribs. That’s where I feel it. That’s where it claws and keens.
-x-
Almost ten years ago now, I sat in a house on a hill and saw dawn breaking over a city suspended in dreams. The house is not mine anymore, but the story still belongs to me. A city asleep, or just escaping the maw of night, and me, in a golden hour of my own choosing, back again at the beginning of things, unspooling one strand of thought at a time, examining it, cataloging it, putting it away — some to be shared now, some to be kept safe for later.
-x-
The unraveling takes time and care. Dust motes have settled inside me to make a colony so robust and strident that it feels like carrying extra weight. There is rust in some parts, too, ideas frozen, their russet patina taunting and tantalizing at once. It can all be rescued, of course — that’s what my father always taught me — but one has to do the work, one has to show up.
-x-
So I showed up today, carrying little more than a desperation that comes from that ancient instinct that my father has, the one he passed to me. I suspect we are both the same, but for me there has decidedly been a dilution in this inherited instinct. Regardless, I am of the people for whom the dust motes and rust could mean a death sentence. We are the people who must show up and do the work. And so, here I am.