Instructions for Crossing

Arrive before light. The crossing opens when the first bird decides it is morning, and not one minute earlier, and the birds here are not punctual. Bring nothing you cannot explain. The guards do not search bags; they ask questions, and the questions are worse.

You will be asked what the chalk line is for. Do not say border. The word is considered an exaggeration. Say agreement. Say the line our grandmothers drew so the argument could stop. If the guard is young, she may ask you to redraw a faded section, and you should do this carefully, kneeling, with the chalk they keep in a coffee tin nailed to the post. The line must wobble where the original wobbled. A straightened line is a new argument.

You may carry letters, but only finished ones. An unfinished letter is contraband on the theory that you might complete it with foreign ideas. You may carry seeds, except tomato. Nobody remembers the reason for the tomato rule and this is precisely why it cannot be repealed — a rule with no living defenders has no living opponents.

You may carry your dead. You must declare them. Not the urn — the dead themselves, by name, out loud, at the post. The guard will write nothing down. The declaration is not for the record. It is so that someone on this side has heard the names spoken before they go over, because the dead, it is believed, settle better in a place where their names have been said at least once into open air.

You may not carry the argument. This is the only rule with teeth. They will know — do not ask how, everyone asks how, and the asking is itself considered a symptom. If you arrive carrying the argument, you will be invited to sit on the bench by the post until you are no longer carrying it. Some people sit for ten minutes. Some people are still there. Meals are provided. There is no shame in the bench, the guards will tell you, and they are lying kindly, and you should let them.

When you cross, cross slowly. Running implies the line is dangerous, and the line is only chalk, and both sides have agreed for four generations to keep it that way. On the far side there is a stone where you can sit and put your shoes back on — you will have taken them off without being asked; everyone does, nobody knows why, the body understands certain thresholds better than the mind does.

Then you are across. It looks the same. The grass is the same grass, the birds the same unpunctual birds. People will tell you the crossing changes nothing and you should believe them, the way you believe a wedding changes nothing, the way you believe a funeral changes nothing — which is to say: the facts survive it. Everything else is different now.

Walk on. Whatever you declared at the post will follow at its own pace.