“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.” —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Though not all populations commit to this—nor to the same overwintering point for those that do—the greatest majority of monarch butterflies travel to the same swathe of oyamel fir forests in southern Mexico. What Vuong doesn’t mention is that if you breed two of these populations, which normally wouldn’t come into contact, the offspring will try to migrate to some point in between their parents' overwintering locations. And if you take a monarch to Europe and raise it there, it will try to migrate across the Atlantic. The memory to navigate, for a distant place to ensure the survival of the species as a whole.
Because what I’m trying to say is that memory is locative, is ancestral, is relentless. Whenever I think about it I envision sleeping without a blanket and watching the closest point of the wall. “To develop the ability to leave an entire nation thusly, just by staring at a spot on the wall” Solmaz had said. My ghost leaving my body to go there, a direction I’m not looking at. They twitch. Trying to save something but I’m not looking at it.