I Wonder

I’m seventeen now, if you recall. When flower shops filled with young girls purchasing carnations for their mothers in May, could you identify my slant eyes, flat nose, and dark hair in the crowd - or did you see only a mass of identical twins? Did you mark on the calendar the senior prom you would never attend? As the neighborhood children grew restless and learned their letters, I wonder if you remembered I wanted to enter primary school. I wanted to wrap my tiny, crooked fingers around your sturdy palm. I wanted you to escort me to class and promise to return at the end of the day, but most of all, I wanted to spend those first six years in your arms.

My eyes watered. Kellie Pickler’s heavily accented voice seeped into my mind. “Sometimes, I think about you, wonder if you're out there somewhere thinking ‘bout me. And would you even recognize the woman that your little girl has grown up to be?” I remembered Kellie at the Country Music Awards singing “I Wonder” with tears streaming down her face, as she recalled the mother who vanished when she was a small child and the alcoholic father who never cared for her properly. Her story reminded me of my own nine months in an orphanage, waiting for love. Just as Kellie used songwriting to release her emotions, I began composing letters to my birth mother, asking her questions about my past, so I could determine my future. Writing proved more helpful than all the clinical therapy in the world.

Every night in my dreams, I run. I do not know where I come from. I do not know where I go. I only know that I link you to Mother II, that I sail between Father and Father II, and that I fly from Canada to China and back again, often in the same night. I wish you could read me what you wrote in your diary between the night of my birth and the night of my abandonment, events merely a week apart, so I could understand why I had to live this life, why I did not deserve to be a princess or your daughter.

One day, I will stop