Dear Mom,

For the last few days, all I’ve been doing is bailing on all the people I love. I guess I probably learned that from you. But Yom Kippur was a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been thinking about atonement.

I’m thinking about actually sending this letter.

I’m mad at you. Mad at you for being too nuts to handle anything, for leaving me stranded as a Jew in the Christian heartland, for not even sticking around to tell me how to be a Jew, or how to be anything, really. When you left, it felt like a chandelier crashing from heaven to the ocean floor and taking me with it. The noise it made was people talking. There were crazy rumors: that you’d run off with our gymnastics coach, that Pops kicked you out for beating me, that you died on the operating table during a botched boob job. Only Pops and I knew that the difference between those stories and what actually happened was that in all of the made-up shit, there was an explanation for why you left.

Why am I thinking so much about childhood, about you, about when you used to be here? Did you know I once got attacked by a Canada goose? It was the autumn after you left: Pops and I were taking a walk around the lake, and Make Way for Ducklings was my favorite book. I was mesmerized by this mama goose and her baby goslings, and I kept trying to get close to pet them, giving Pops the runaround as he tried to chase me. I was a pretty fearless kid — maybe you remember that — kind of drawn to dangerous places: the tip-top of the playground slide, the deep end of the pool, too close to wild animals. Anyway, I crept toward the mama goose near the edge of the lake, and she rose up in this big majestic wingspread like a thunderbird, scaring me off for a minute. She had one beady eye fixed on me the whole time, so I don’t know why I thought I could sneak up on her, but I got away from Pops and bum-rushed the birds, determined to crash-bang my way into the family. I got within about two feet of the terrified goslings before the mama dove for my arm and bit me harder than I’ve ever been bitten, even by Marcy. I hollered bloody murder and burst into tears and Pops actually kicked the goose. My arm was so black and blue — the doctor said I was lucky Mother Goose didn’t break it — that we got funny looks at the grocery store for weeks. That’s why I hate birds. That and I think you liked them.

I like being scary a lot more than I like being scared. But it’s strange, you know? Feeling apart from people all the time.

You hardly know any of the people in my life. You don’t even know Marcy. And you don’t know Rowie, but she’s the girl who just broke my heart. Rowie’s real name is Rohini and she has beautiful black eyes and long branch-brown arms and we’re — well, we used to be — MCs together and I haven’t talked to her since we fell out. I don’t even know if she’s, like, okay. She doesn’t know it, but I pick up the phone and start to call her every day. I wondered while I was falling asleep last night if she’ll ever be glad I happened to her. Despite everything, in a secret sacred place that no one will ever be able to gossip about, I’m still glad she happened to me.

Rowie and I had, like, a secret relationship and my friend Tess found out, and from there word just got around the way shit does here, a place where nothing ever happens, and the next thing everyone knew, everyone knew. I’m not even really mad at Tess now, even though I was at first. In a weird way, I’m almost grateful to her for doing what I couldn’t, whatever it was that Rowie’s fear or my own mournful borders kept me from doing.

I’m out. I’m not like the pretty girls, the salon-blond birds hanging out the passenger windows of all the hockey players’ trucks, with their indoor laughs and shallow lacquered faces. I’m a lot of things — hardheaded, smart-mouthed, kind of oddly dressed — but I’ll never be like those girls. And I’m glad. I needed to get honest about who I am, honest about the fact that I’m not ashamed to be this kind of girl, and I have that gladness now. I wear it like a pendant on a chain. I’m Esme Rockett, foul-mouthed, prickly syntaxed, oddly dressed, and gay.

I can’t decide whether being an only child makes it easier or harder for me to reject. Sometimes for a hot minute I hate Rowie, hate her in a heated humiliated way, for always wriggling farther away whenever I wanted to get closer, for telling me I didn’t understand the way she was different and never realizing how much she has that I don’t: a sister, a mother. Do we all hate the people we love sometimes? Sometimes I imagine myself breaking up with everyone in my life. (You did that.) I’ve never told anyone this, but I’ve always been secretly terrified that all the people I love most privately despise me, that I’m, I don’t know, a trying person, a vexacious, snarky, know-it-all brat who can only be tolerated for so long. Maybe I was even worse than I think I am, like really awful, and that’s why she couldn’t ever be my girlfriend.

It’s funny how experience is made up as much of what we forget as it is of what we remember. I never remember how mean I was to Charlie Knutsen back in August. I do remember every mean thing I said to Rowie the night we fell out. Or maybe I don’t. I’m not funny anymore. Or I worry about that. My thoughts aren’t really connecting; this has been happening a lot lately. I find myself having to talk myself through things, narrating my own life, having to understand it in words, a lot lately. Pops says I should make things out of what I’m feeling, so I’m making things: making rhymes, making sculptures, making letters. The words hang all around me like hot summer lemons and limes, like suspended jewels hungry for my touch, and I am in love with them, and with the sound of them.

I do feel better when I make things. I remember to feel better. Seeing yourself in a letter is funny, like seeing yourself naked in someone else’s house. The whole body business gets really gross by now; you never told me that. Why didn’t you stick around to explain any of this shit to me? My boobs are bigger than last year, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to be this hairy. No one ever told me having sex makes you look different but only to yourself.

Pops says it’s my Jewish responsibility to atone for you. Tess says forgiveness comes if you let it. So I guess my tasks are to atone for your sins to God and forgive you myself. I may be working on that for a while.

Well, Mom, I know this is sort of random and wandering, and I’m sorry. I’m trying to get better at telling people how I feel about them, because I’ve learned that it really sucks when other people can’t tell you how they feel about you. So I’m still mad at you, and I don’t even really feel like I know you, but I suppose that I love you, or that I could try to love you if you ever stuck around long enough for me to stop being mad at you. I’ll probably just keep trying to figure out how to love you and be mad at you at the same time, while I work on forgiving and atoning for you. Do you miss me, ever?

Sincerely, your spawn,
Esme Ruth Rockett