It is midnight, and I am having the dream again. The same dream that pesters me with answers I refuse to hold up to the light, slice open like an envelope, and slip out in the same freeing motion as the day my green card arrived. The gold doorknob blinds me with the shine of the moon’s teeth. I am a monochromatic ghost blue paint streaked like one of Picasso’s oil paintings from his Blue Period.

I do not want to look up at the looming shadow made of ghastly breaths and a Colgate smile before me, so I lean past it like a rude godson. Becoming a citizen is contending with becoming indebted to the same nation that painted you an oozing dark azure martian. 

Outside, the hush of fear consumes my feet that flap the now sticky dirt. In the distance there is a chicken coop but no chicken, only a girl with talons for feet covered in feathers. She is marred and tired of fighting her escape, fear-stricken like a horror film starlet. When I reach her, she is in the full colors of her sand, caramel plumage, her hair a frayed emerald nest, her eyes the color of a pulsing sun. This is not a nightmare. This is a coming out. A woman fearful of not passing as the thing she is. This is a coming out. An illegal, a persecution, with a desire to stay wrapped in barbed wire and taken hostage. 

In the dream I have not escaped America’s USA, nor a white woman who, in passing, at the Citizenship Ceremony snuck into my sleep walk and nudged me, saying, “Smile, smile!” while my mother, dazzled by the American Dream in my hands, camera ready, wants to snap me in two. She understands my resignation to this country as a grassroots organizer with “radical” ideas of righteousness. But my mother understands more our collective new sense of no-running, no-hiding, a normal she doesn’t understand we can never be. For her, for safety, I have betrayed my comrades. This is a nightmare.

The moment of celebration is upon everyone receiving their Citizenship Certificate—except me. The Los Angeles Convention Center is filled with the booming with bright faced, tear smeared men and women, and camera snaps. I pass by a giant framed photograph of Donald Duck and accompanied by billowing USA flags hung at the neck. Instead of my mother’s camera, I trace the cornsilk of the woman shaking her fists in excitement. Rage is my easiest escape. I cannot blame a white woman for her excitement over a country that turns us into awardees for simply existing. This is the colonial project. Yet, I pierce through her, the way midnight does to the earth when she sits on top of the hour because it’s all I can do to redeem myself. The white woman turns on her heel and flees my darkness when I don’t implement her suggested smile. 

I dent the Citizenship Certificate from the edge I hold it, a limp ghost in my hand. I fan freedom into the hot fury on my face to reset. I look back at my mother and reveal bitter, gritted teeth—a symbolic fang, a smile deferred. 

My eyes are chestnut brown on days I walk under the sun, but in this delirium, the sclera, iris, and pupil of my eyes turn a military blue and I drown in the waking hours of new citizenship. 

The cloaked, looming, and smoky figure returns with its Colgate smile. It looms in the rightmost corner at the end of the long hallway we have to walk down to evacuate the Citizenship Ceremony. I don’t mind it taking me: a hypocrite of the movement. “Fuck the system,” I chanted but now I’m on my knees, wiping the wet of America’s USA’s victory over me. My mother runs away from me. 

According to Aztec mythology, Cihuateteo had eagle talons for hands. It is how she clawed the soul of warriors, women who died during childbirth.

The girl in my dream is not a goddess, or folklore, only an orphan to the American Dream and her name is my own. She is the girl I was never able to embody as a child, so now she is bloody and damaged in a chicken coop somewhere, ashamed of two secrets. I am bloody and damaged in the waking world, a trans woman in America’s USA as a formerly undocumented person. The secrets are out but my wings have been clipped to a pedestrian silhouette. I am a normal girl until I’m discovered. I want to hide my plumage, but I don’t. My talons strut for me on days I can’t find the will to be a naturalized citizen while also a trans woman in the same breath.

The blue oil streak of the boy in my dreams confesses he creates fictions, a harpy girl strapped in a chicken coop, because it’s easier to make sense of an undocumented psyche that way. Confused legislation can vanish you for more reasons than one, without trial, he says with the wisdom of a persecuted man. What is the point of making poultry netting unfurl like marigolds and bend their neck towards the sun when I remain subconsciously bound to the fantasy of a blue child in order to survive? In waking, I cannot confront the reality that I am no longer persecuted to be afraid, but I am still terrified to be persecuted and to have lost all fear. Without the cerulean scribble of a boy, I would be a ruthless woman with bullets in her mouth. 

It is midnight, yet I am not in the dream again. This time I am at the borderlands of reality and fiction. My manicured hands dig into time and space to create a ripped portal to the realm of the sky blue boy and the bloody harpy girl. My strength is Herculean. My manicured hands drip with dimensional plasma but keep the window open long enough to whistle and summon the blue boy to me as if he were a dog. With his flat, navy blue feet on sticky dirt, he runs to me. I hand him a pair of shears. He knows what to do. The scene will go dark with only the sound of a thrashing harpy. We will hear the snapping of metal thread and a final tumble. There is commotion in the darkness, a shriek, a scurrying, before the goddess Chihuateteo swallows this dream as a sacrifice for her protection.

I am awakened by a set of white, white teeth. My mother is wearing red lipstick (she never wears red lipstick anymore) and asks me if I’m alive. She is not the looming ghost, the pressure of the American Dream anymore. “Yes, I’m alive mom,” I say after jolting awake and gasping for air. “I’m an American Citizen,” I say when I’ve caught my breath.  I meant Native to the Americas. She will nod and take my hand.  

My mother hands me a glass of water with sucrose, “Felicidades mi amor,” she’ll say, chiming the spoon as she spins it, clinking the rim to avoid spillage before removing it. “I thought you weren’t going to make it back,” she confesses. 

This isn’t the first time I almost didn’t make it back from dream walking. “Well,” I reply, “I’m back and I’m not made of blue paint strokes,” I say jokingly, in between gulps of sugar water. “But you are,” she says, “look at you.” My hand holding the glass in the air is the blue of the imitation leather that binds a Passport. While there is no trace of the shimmering gold sigil of the Great Seal of the United States: an eagle, a bundle of arrows in one talon, an olive branch in the other, a shield—somewhere on my body I feel breathless and begin to sink.

“I had a dream last night,” I say. “Not a nightmare?” she asks. “I was soaring through the sky,” I pause, “it was peaceful minus a pinching on my shoulder. Something, someone, was carrying me through the sky, though I could not look up.” 

* You can read more of féi iká shumarí’s writing here.

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