becoming crossings

halim madi

i have a lebanese passport. that one fact has shaped how i move through airports, embassies, forms. it has also, slowly, taught me how to move through the digital terrain i.e. the paywalls, the geofences, the algorithmic price brackets, the soft enclosures that decide what loads, what doesn't, who gets in.

becoming crossings is a piece about that crossover. you land on a single horizontal line. you click. a new line extends from the last endpoint. when one of your lines crosses another, a dot appears. seven crossings, seven fragments. by the end you have a map of your own trespassings, and a thread of seven short texts on what migrant consciousness teaches a digital body. how to morph. how to refuse legibility. how to embrace the eel as a power animal. how to recognize that the border is a feeling, familiar, before it is a wall.

every reader's map is different. every reader's order through the texts is the same. when you are done, you can save your quilt of crossings and add it to a collective archive made by other readers. the work is the third movement of a trilogy: hatching, splitting, crossings, sitting with the migrant body as a teacher of digital citizenship.

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