“Sometimes I feel like I was born out of a faultline, where two tectonic plates meet.”

You say it like it’s a joke. We’re standing in line at the Post Office, my second (failed) attempt at getting a passport. I scribble frantically, a pile of documents spilling out of an old manilla envelope. Fragments, highschool yearbook photos, newspaper clippings, anything to prove the existence of a body in motion. I keep thinking about the movements of bodies, of our bodies. Of barriers. Fences, blockades. From the French word barriere, a fortification defending an entrance.

What does it mean to be born out of a faultline? A faultline is a fracture deep in the rock of the earth  that splits it in two. Scientists are able to trace the displacement of the halves by identifying the piercing point, finding the two halves and following the geological trail back in time to when they were whole. You were born out of shattering rock and shifting plates.
Your father was an American soldier, your mother grew up in a rural village in the Philippines. You tell me that they were starving, surviving on only rice. It’s not a coincidence that all the Filipina women in your family are married to white American GIs. How much choice is there in the movement of bodies? In the movement of our bodies?

Barriers. Blockades. Boundaries. Like scars, like the fissures of stone.

A fault is responsibility for an accident, as in “It’s all my fault”. I can trace the fault line, the words of apology in the way we hold our bodies. How many times have you told me that I don’t need to apologize? I pronounce it the way my daddy does, the way his daddy does. This is what it’s like loving across diaspora. Voices thick with cities we’ve only been to once.