She keeps telling me she is [   ], not [   ], and I say nothing,
since I have never been either myself. They do not cover this
in the book on allyship. She gets braids for a second time, streaked

with blonde. She says colours are a cry for attention, a neediness,
but the wheat tone is pleasing. She says they are heavy but
you get used to them. Especially when you are expecting

the way they pull at the scalp. My husband does not recognize
her in the picture. I shrug, one shoulder tilting beneath my purple bob,
uneven in the balance. A set of scales is something you can hold out,

to let the person most concerned with calibration / exchange /
transformation figure out what it all means, the measurement
and the feather on the other side. I am a point in time. A crux.

A pivot. The trick to remembering is to know that we do not become
a solid thing until we die. Up to that point everything is
an active becoming. The way certain crustaceans can keep shedding

their last confinement until they carry around so much mass
they can no longer stand to be tender, they can no longer manage
to escape. I cannot give anyone answers, so I become a small

chip of flint, a small silence in a conversation, a small carving in the rock
face. I become an absence so small it can’t be seen from the ground but
it holds a toe long enough for you to press yourself flat against the climb

and rest. We are not all built to be beautiful, we are not all built to rampage.
Fossilization is the kind of change I can be in this world, come daybreak.