I can’t remember migration. My body remembers for me, and strikes me with a physical wrongness. Skin that dries too quickly. Teeth too big, too hungry and dissatisfied. Calves waiting to fill a purpose big enough for them that will never come.

My body knows we aren’t meant to be here, and I can’t convince it that this is the only way it can be.

Migration has never felt like a choice to my family. It was something done to us. It is a process that will never stop changing us. We negotiate daily the ways we let migration change us. How much is my family willing to let migration change our tongues? How much are we willing to push our bodies, just to end up forsaking the shape of our souls?

I don’t have a clear memory of migrating from where I was born to this other country, which makes the memories of the aftermath more confusing than clarifying. I could only see the consequence, and I couldn’t even put a name to it. I have more memories of other people’s homes and the noise that flooded through them; all the better than remembering empty nights without a whole family, only the long train horn as reliable company.

The house is empty to begin with because my family has been committed to this unnatural version of migration: be forced out of your home country because it has been devastated by colonization, move to fill the colonizer’s disgust-desire for your labor, keep your family alive through all of this, and teach your children that this is how it must be. They will grow up and feel indebted and guilty, always. They will push themselves to alleviate even a little bit of this feeling. They will be reminded to be grateful, always. Going to the home country will always feel queasy. It will never feel like return, and it will always feed our guilt.

It shouldn’t be like this. There must be a way to tear out this guilt that gnaws at us and that we consume in return.

For this, I have always felt severed from place. I’d like to think that I don’t have to be tied to it in the first place, and I don’t have to feel lost for feeling that way.

My body has always felt distant to me. My body is a home that I will have to leave someday too. Maybe I’ll want to leave it, and feel better for it. I am trying to make peace with it, even if I am always on guard and ready to run from it at any moment.

My body understands difference before I can, and it has to try to convince me that this is always how it was going to be.

I realized my Queerness in a car in the Philippines. It happened like all other thoughts: sudden, obvious, true. Something to instantly panic about. I couldn’t be more. I was already so much. I feel that muchness crawling all over me, like everyone can see it. Everyone can sense it, I think. I don’t know how a person who can connect with another couldn’t see it. It’s so obvious, I’m too obvious.

I often want to be unseen.

I often wonder if I could have conceived myself as Trans* if I were tied to another place. Through colonization, imperialist forces have crushed anything other than a binary gender system that seeks to reinforce values tied to patriarchy and capitalism. It is just another thing that happened to us, like anything else could, like typhoons, like loss.

Sit up straight. Be a proper lady. Close your legs. Look better. Lose weight. Just another thing, like volcanic eruptions, like tragedy.

Would a different place really make that much of a difference? Or would I have been left grasping at language, never able to put a name to it?

I avoided confronting what it meant to be Trans* Nonbinary because it meant that I would have to acknowledge the place that my body has in my life. I never wanted it, and thought it easier to be unattached from it. But every cell is aligned this way, and I cannot pretend that ignoring it is possible. I feel detached from femininity and masculinity. Is it not enough to just be? On this Earth, in this version of life, I am Trans*. In another place, in another lifetime, I could be called something else but the feeling would still be the same. In the end, it is that feeling that I must make peace with.

One day, I would like to have a body that I can really call mine, and mean it. I have to plan on that day being in this lifetime. In having a body, I must be seen. I might as well try to choose how I am seen.

My body feels migration as a continuous process. We move, we change, until I’ve made so much of myself that it cannot be contained in one body. I am many bodies for whatever suits the time, the people, the occasion. Here is the immigrant. Here is the Queer. Here is neither. Here is what never was. Have you ever felt so displaced from yourself? Where am I supposed to go after that?

I am tired of being so many bodies. Who the fuck was I ever supposed to be?

Migration has changed the shape of my soul over and over again, with each death it affords me, with each death it forces on me.

But to feel okay again, I have to turn away from anthropocentric sensitivities. Learning from nature is the refuge I needed from these human-made and imposed structures of hardship. I learn from nature that nothing is affixed. Migration and Transness are found in nature everywhere. These are things that can exist because there is no border to dictate them otherwise.

In this world of human constraints, even if migration was a choice we could have made, it is somehow touted as both something bound to happen and something to hate. Even if Transness was a choice I could have made, it is touted as something to hate and something that was always going to happen. I am tired of buying into inevitability. There is no such thing as always. There is no system built that cannot be torn down. No version of my body could be segmented into boundaries. The shape of my body and the shape of my soul do not have to feel so incongruous with one another.

This bitterness that I have always felt—for being an immigrant, for being Queer, for being Trans*—I am working every day to lay it to rest. It feels out of place, but it is the choice I make to feel at peace. What I want to do one day is lay my body down, with gentle care and cultivated love, to be returned again to the dirt.