Beloved Nothingness

L03 // dead's mailbox

January 3, 1987

Dear Mom,

I know your name now. They always called you 'your mom' but today I know. Anissa. I still don't know if it was "Ah-nissa" or "Ah-nessa" because they certainly didn't tell me. I know because I read your letter today. It was never a spoken rule that I was going to wait until my sixteenth birthday to read the letter you wrote for me, but it just happened that way. We learned cursive in third grade but I tried and I couldn't get past "Bella" in the beginning. It's so strange to see a stranger call me that. Everyone I don't know well just calls me Annabel or Anna. But you chose Bella.

Today, I'm the age that you were when you had me and it could make me cry right now. I can't even imagine that. I'm drowning in school, I'm at soccer practice every day, I'm waitressing at the diner on weekends, and I would be lost without my time for friends on Fridays. Where does a baby fit in there? I don't even know if you finished high school. The only bits and pieces about you that I can cling to are from your letter. I wish you would've made that one paragraph longer, about the night we had together the day that you left.

I've learned all the things you wanted to know about daddy without needing you to tell me. So you can know that I take care of him, I don't let him go unnoticed at all. I haven't even told him that I finally read your letter, but now I'll have to since I'm crying.

Why am I crying? Your letter really didn't tell me anything, besides how you wished you were a better mother to me and that you loved my dad. But if you loved my dad, how is he not my biological father? Where were you going so often that you didn't even know my nighttime routine?

My therapist says I'm allowed to be angry with you. He's an old man, a grandfather, and he has this long white beard that always has coffee stains in it. Am I angry? I have no clue. I always feel badly when I can't hand him my thoughts neatly packaged and wrapped with a bow, but I don't how many times he's told me that his job is to take what's confusing and disastrous and work with it until it makes sense to me. I don't even have enough thoughts about you for him to make something pretty.

I feel like there's so much you should know about me, things that moms should know. I learned about puberty from that book about bodies from that doll company, and I had my first period at eleven. My first training bra would've been around third grade. Aunt Lena took me to get it, and dad didn't even notice that I needed one. He's good at so many things, but girl things are not one of them. I haven't kissed anyone yet, so I'm obviously still a virgin. How were you already a mother by this point? I don't even know how to hold a boy's hand, how to do more than talk through awkward lags between classes. There was one boy who said he would give me fifty dollars for a photograph of my body. He's popular, mom, everyone likes him and thinks he's great. He plays football and he has nice hair. When he talks to me my insides feel spoiled.

Well, I should probably tell you a few more basic things about me. Right now I'm in French III, Chemistry, Pre-Calculous, English 11, U.S. History, Speech, Painting III, and Drawing III. I love art more than I can express. Dad doesn't understand it, but my work is the only decoration in our house. He even got my oil painting, it's of a lighthouse and it actually won best of show at the art fair, hung up in the waiting room of his doctor's office. I always play offensive positions in soccer because I'm fast, but I'm not tough. I've never been carded for hurting another player no matter how much my coach yells at me to be more aggressive. He always tells me that he would kick me off if there were more people on the team, but there are already a few colleges saying they'll pay for my school, if I come play for them. I'm good at scoring goals, mom. I just can't go for a girl's ankle to do it.

Let's see, I'm not sure what else you tell a mother. I have black curly hair, and dad doesn't know how to do it at all. Once I was old enough to actually care for it myself, it looked so much better. I keep it long so it's heavier, and the curls are looser. I have dark blue eyes that apparently look like yours, but Aunt Lena said we don't have anything else in common. Whenever it's my off season, I gain weight like crazy even though dad and I eat so healthily. I always have breasts and hips and thighs even running seven miles a day. Aunt Lena says that you were tiny, barely one hundred pounds soaking wet, in her words. Apparently, everything about you was fragile and delicate – a tiny, upturned nose, a small pout for lips, sharp cheekbones and a jutting collarbone. Sometimes I'll put dark powder in the pools of my collarbone so it's more visible.

The more I learn, I know that I'm truly not dad's baby. An auburn-haired girl and a blond boy can't produce someone like me. You're both so recessive. Also, he tried to give me the sex talk but it was purely medical since apparently, we're both virgins. Aunt Lena gave me the one that teenaged girls need, according to her.

He's so handsome and smart and kind, I don't know why he doesn't go on dates at all. Every time any of those young secretaries or nurses that work with him see me, they always tell me strange things that let me know that they're aware that dad is all three of those things. I don't want to put in a good word for any of them. They know that he's single, that I'm his daughter, but I don't want any of them to be my stepmother. It's hard to read any books are watch any movies and not be afraid of stepmothers.

I need to work on my homework now. Maybe I'll write to you again, but I'm not sure. The dead can't exactly get mail.

-Anissa Edwards