Reading the Letter

We hadn't seen each other ever before. Well, maybe she had seen me, but I couldn't remember her- and it was impossible I could look the same now as I did all those years ago.

The letter arrived like an earthquake, like nothing before had shaken the earth from which I thought I'd been grown. I was a tree in the shade of another, a seedling of that same tree. Perhaps a bit different certainly, but no tree ever grows the same way. My mother's eyes were shaded like mine, only my eyes held slivers of green glimmering and slicing up the purity of the blue, but the shadows, those were the same. Our hair is only off by the stray amber hairs diluting the dark of mine. My laugh is a weak echo of the sophisticated, woodwind tones I hear in hers. This woman, she is my mother.

The letter told me I was wrong. A question never asked was given an answer.

A quick hand had scribbled out the earth-quaking words, so simply, so matter of fact, it was like they were true. The scrawl was unordered, full of cross outs, and a single coffee ring like a strange moon framed a few words, brown, and as foreign to me as the writer. The paper was earthy, a cream, and soft, as a letter that had been crumpled up and thrown away many times then recovered and smoothed out again with the gentle, apologetic hands of a lover. The words that made me so utterly wrong about my life, my very own life that I ought to know since I'd lived it all the way through and never skipped a moment of? They were simple, as I'd said, plain, and short as I am your birthmother. And accompanying words that were drowned in the tides and roars of shock rolling over me were as clean and clear in their intentions and meanings. Somewhere, a lion was roaring, it could have been the other side of the world, but the moment fixed my hearing so that it was right in my ear, deafening and horrifying. A beast that wanted to devour me, an animal I'd never seen with my own eyes except on television.

My mother leaned over my shoulder, to see the letter trembling between my fingers, about to take flight and flutter to the floor and took it. Her lovely eyes like mine, eyes I thought I'd been given by her, scanned the paper with growing sadness. Our eyes linked in the air, blue versus the mixed, the obviously different, the ones that weren't hers. All the questions I never asked rose to my lips, hesitated there, changed course to claw out of my eyes, to plunge and steam down my cheeks on fire, wet, and I curled into her embrace when it came.

Receiving the Letter

I had lived in the glass house on the hill since as long as I could remember, living out the windows on the cliffs and beaches and boardwalks scattered and spread like toys about me. The house is made of light and well-grained wood. Wood with stories, but only ones about trees. The glass is smooth and thin as air, making up the west walls of the house, making it seem like you need only take a step and you will be out on the ocean.

The ocean is like my personal lake, its waves merely over-sized ripples to gently tumble over my skin and mutter about the stars and mermaids against my hair. It is a writhing rainbow of the blue scale; indigo, sapphire, cyan, navy, aqua, marine, turquoise, teal and everything in between. It whispers and rumbles, it breathes and sighs, it lives right out my back door. It is as much a part of my life as my family, and it is as familiar as a pet, mercurial still as a beast.

I have lived in the glass house on the hill with my family since as long as I could remember. Their faces are as familiar to me as the ocean's face, the face that changes and is infamous for its unpredictability. Its sudden rages frighten me as any of my families', but more, as I don't know its heart as I do its face. My mother's face is like mine, but with higher cheekbones, a sculptured shaping to the lips and the line of her jaw. My father's is easy, yet still clever, moving to occupy new personalities as quick as a shift of light.

We had been at dinner, a casual one, sitting on the deck with everyone getting up as they pleased, my siblings twining about and winding like creatures, squirrels the younger, and some creature more purposeful and clever the older. Our family numbered five children, of which I am just one, but most like our parents in behavior. There had never been any hint that I was a fledgling of a different nest, the seedling of another tree. Except once, but how could I have known what it meant?

As a little girl, my dad would read me to sleep with classic novels like Gulliver's Travels and King Solomon's Mines. One night, he was reading to me the story of Oliver Twist, and abruptly he stopped when comprehending the character of Agnes. His eyes gleam over with some mystery. He and I stop and stare at each other, and I see myself reflected as a stranger in the dark brown mirrors before me. I beg of him to start reading again and the moment is lost, his eyes melting from glass to chocolate again.

At the dinner, there was nothing to remind me of this moment again, until Sandy'd come back to the table to plomp down the stack of post for us to bandy about and read during dinner, as we were wont to do at such casual occasions. The paterfamilias handles the stack first, of course, separating the debris and flotsam of junk mail out of our real letters and tossing them neatly into our unobtrusively crackling chiminea. The stack is set back down again, and we are allowed to paw through the letters as brothers and sisters do when trying to jostle the other out of the way. I reach into the fray and snatch free a slightly earthy, off-white letter.

The seal is sloppy, and the address is of uncertain return addressing. My father notices it, and he extends a hand to see it. Passing the letter over, I watch as he reads the return address. His eyes return to that strange mirror texture again, and I bounce back off his eyes, only seeing myself. It is like a moment in a dream where you've gone to somewhere you've never been in real life, and suddenly you see yourself reflected in the glass, a stranger in a strange place, all your flaws risen to the surface, glowing. His hand is shivering, and he restores the letter to my hands. There is a brief moment where his eyes shift to stare into my mother's, unspeakable words speaking themselves right there in the air. He nods us both upstairs, his eyebrows flat for once, his usual mode of communication lost as his eyes were on me. My mother nodded, her face filled with some sort of put-off dread I'd only seen when she plunged her hand into a tadpole-filled bucket to find her dropped ring.

My confusion at these two rare and off-putting expressions by my parents made me nervous too. What did this letter mean? Who could it possibly be from that would fill them with such strangeness, and such distance? Never had I felt so far from them, so differenced by the years between my parents, my closest, oldest, wisest of people I'd ever known. The letter was a thing come to shake this fragile earth I stood on, the earth I thought so strong.

The Letter
Dear Daughter,

I have meant to write you for a long time, but only now have I gotten the courage to send one of the hundreds of letters I'd written. I am your birthmother. By now, your adopted family has probably grown you into a respectable, beautiful young woman, and I am sorry to have missed so much. I have given you up, but now I regret my choice, and my heart is troubled for the love of you. Please write to me soon, so I may know if I am ever to be forgiven for my mistake.

Soon, I will be coming to the Golden Coast, so we might meet if you wish. We could try to make up all those years I lost us together, and tell each other of our separate adventures.


Much love,

Your mother, Katinka

The Mother

With the urging of my parents, no, the people who raised me, I sent Katinka a letter back. A short, brief thing, it bled no love, it wept no regret, and only arranged us to meet at my family's glass house on the hill.

After weeping into my blue-eyed mother's arms for an undetermined amount of time, I slipped out of her embrace to stand at the window overlooking the sea. The ocean had yet to betray me, its roots were not as deep as those of trees, and it only calmly took in my burning, sharp-beating heart. Shards of these questions, these feelings I didn't know how to feel about, they still cut their harsh way out the corners of my eyes. My mother, no, the woman who raised me, stood uncertainly, not knowing whether to move to comfort me or to leave me in my silent communication with the ocean. After a long stretch where I could feel her gaze grazing my shoulder, she left the room. My hand lifted itself to press against the airy glass, to see if it was still real, or if my hand would simply pass through into the sunset breeze.

It was several days till I would meet Katinka, several days to steel myself against yet another woman wanting to be my mother. Well, neither could be, with this terrible trick they'd played on me, their false cooing. I wouldn't be a seedling anymore, having a family, with roots to get torn up and thrashed, storms to strike me down and burn my leaves for what they really are. I would become the ocean, and I would become myself at last. The truths I'd never thought to question would yanked free of the earth, their origins and answers given to me as I deserved. I would be wrathful as the sea, I would crash against rocks for centuries and as long as I needed to crumble them, and follow the moon to the ends of the earth and round again. I will be stronger than needing either of them.


When we finally meet, and she is nothing like I expected: a fawning creature candy-glossed with lipstick and powdered makeup masking her into sugary sweetness? No, she is venerable somehow, her skin giving the impression of vitality from its raw golden color, and her lips slim, rather severe. Her eyes are large and glittering with celery-green dust dirtying and slicing up the purity of the blue. When these eyes catch on me, she gives an apologetic smile as she stares openly at me. I feel as an exhibit, but I stare just as hungrily back at her face, hunting for the smallest clue to any of the questions I have yet to say. She is tall, and I am short. She is beautiful in the half-fleeting way of bounding deer, of leaping wolves. Perhaps I would see the ocean trapped in her eyes. Perhaps she could see it in mine?

We stand, not speaking a word either one. At a loss for words to say, we only drown in the silence, wondering if it was worth swimming up to break the surface and tension making this fresh-stewed sea. My mouth opens several times to begin to say something, anything, but the words get all tangled on the way out and they gag themselves on their own length.

At last, she speaks, and her voice is weathered, feathering the air with hints of an accent, a smoke left of a foreign fire, “What is your name?”

This is something I had been unprepared for, my heart leaps about, I forget my name. My blue-eyed mother stands behind me, my ocean-eyed mother stands in front of me. What is my name? If I am truly neither mother's daughter, who would I be without their name clinging to me, softening edges and sharpening others in this reality?

There have been years of growing up in the blue-eyed mother's embrace and under her shade, so I would not be burnt by the sun and be instead bathed daily in her care. There is a father and brothers and sisters to squabble and laugh with on the cliffs and beaches and boardwalks. There have been years of my love lapping the ocean, its stoicism never letting me know if it loved me back, but here is a woman to be the ocean embodied. There is an ocean to cling to without getting salted over and drowned in waves, an ocean to hold me as it never had before.

There is the past.

There is the present.

There is a realization. I look into the eyes of my mother. Her blue eyes crinkle, the way they do when she's trying to smile her most encouragingly, and when she tries to be forgiven. I've never had to forgive her before. I turn to Katinka, my ocean mother, the one I must forgive for loving me without my knowing.

“My name is Marina,” I say.