Themed Months
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Letter to My Dad
I wonder if the adoption agency thought they were clever, or if they thought both adoptive parents and adoptee having brown hair was enough to signal we belonged to each other.
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To My Third Father
I didn’t understand consent, the formal severance of me and my biological father. Like magic, my past dissipated.
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Mayonnaise
I don’t know which herbs, spices, or ice cream flavors you like because 23&Me won’t tell me, and neither will you.
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Reaching
Last summer, I tied my hair into braids and glued a mustache to my upper lip, and I wondered if you might recognize your own youth.
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Ghosts in the Mirror
My adoptive mother tells me I was precocious enough as a toddler to ask if I came from her belly. She says this was a sign I comprehended my adoption so early she never had to explain it to me.
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Debtors to a Mercy We Never Begged For
No, home is not as simple as the heart-shaped sandwiches Ma placed into my lunch bag on Valentine’s Day or the way my father confessed to listening to me sing shower showtunes or washing a car beside my brother as…
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The Mothership
Most of all, I hoped they’d see how well I turned out and regret ever sending me away.
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The Beat Goes On
If the average lifespan is roughly 76 years, then that one muscle, the size of a fist, beats 2,796,192,000 times. It never quits, until it quits.
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What She Kept
I hand-wrote my mother a letter entirely in hangul. It looked like a child wrote it, which was because a child wrote it.
