where I’m from

When people ask where I’m from I want to say…

I came from an accident

Not a happy one

One born on a warm summer day as a little boy smiling from ear to ear was tossed from horseback cracking his head open on the ground and bleeding out in my parents car in the way to the hospital

I want to say I came by accident

One my mother used to joke she wished was cancer

A joke born out of not wanting to be pregnant again

I want to say there’s a wide valley in the middle of California that formed when some ancient wizard fought a dragon and the heat still simmers from the ground making the summers unbearable to this day

I want to say I’m from a town called anxiety where as a child all my deepest fears burrowed their home in my skin despite my best efforts to claw them from me and drag them into a roadside ditch

I want to say I came from the culmination of religious shame and guilt, born out of a need to fulfill some invisible persons expectations, doomed to stumble my way down the rabbit hole of anxiety and depression for fear I’d never be good at praying

When people ask me where I’m from I want to say I’m from a thousand different and opposing things married together in contradiction to everything I’ve come to be.