one.

In every high school biology course

students sit and learn about genetics;

finding that a single human being

is a recombination of their parents’ genes

and their parents’ parents’ genes,

stretching all the way back

to the very beginning.

You are a mixture of everyone

who has ever come before you.

two.

You used to dream about leaving

and starting somewhere new,

but now that you’re here,

away from your beginning,

you wonder what will happen

to what you so freely left behind.

three.

Years later you sit in a lecture hall

of the new place you call home.

They talk once more of genetics

and you are reminded that your history

is not so easily hidden;

because it lies in your eyes,

their very color a map of your past,

a mixture of everyone

who has come before you.