Now that I’m older, I suspect my mother used marriage as a way to reinvent herself. As if she could slough off the past and emerge whole and unmarked, ready to slip into the circumstances of someone else’s life. Her own circumstances, the ones she was born into, were poverty, eight younger siblings, a brick and aluminum bungalow, a backhoe parked out in the yard. Thick, golden-brown hair that fell to the middle of her back. Eyes the color of an azure butterfly. A tall, graceful frame. The broad-faced bone structure she inherited from her grandmother. An accent that wherever she went would betray her origins, a variation on the Ozark hillbilly and Deep South. When she left the small town where she’d grown up, she found a dialect coach and “neutralized” the accent. Evidence perhaps that she had ideas about the kind of person she wanted to appear to be. Also that she understood how to cork the past, contain it inside her.

[...] I was a teenager and so already understood myself to be something of a creature unlike others, a being of anomalous or uncertain nature, a half-formed human trying to find a way to exist among all the fully formed humans I was certain everyone else already was. I wanted to believe that this sense of lessness or halfness would one day be a sense of moreness or wholeness, but also carried with me a certainty that everywhere I might belong was elsewhere, anywhere but where I happened to be. [...]

It had been two, maybe three months since we had last spoken. There had been no catastrophic event, no falling out. Everett Everett had started seeing someone and our friendship waned. I already miss you, I wrote to Everett Everett. Our email archive ends there. He never replied. I was wounded but also too myopic to recognize that I could also hurt people, was not only ever the one to be hurt.