The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: Parts Three–Four

The wormhole theory postulates that a theoretical passage through space-time could create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe...

A wormhole (or Einstein-Rosen bridge) is a speculative structure linking disparate points in space-time, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations solved using a Jacobian matrix and determinant.

A wormhole (or Einstein-Rosen bridge) is a speculative structure linking disparate points in space-time, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations solved using a Jacobian matrix and determinant.

Perhaps we may dare hope to find that reunion is just a wormhole between two points (mother and child, for example) on one distinct timeline?

I do want to say that if any of my curt verbalizations hurt you—I am sorry.

I have been to New York City, to drop my older brother Jon off at Columbia, but I have never ventured to this part of the state before.

Patricia’s house is modest, a two-story bungalow with a small porch in front. Yellow trim lines the quaint brick exterior.

I am more taciturn, realizing all at once that we are here. We are here, which means that in just a moment, I will gather myself, walk down the concrete pathway to the front door, and knock.

When Bobbi and I had determined that we would, in fact, make the trip, I realized that we would need money for gas and other incidentals like food.

There’s a sharp tap on the window, and I’m broken from my reverie.

These past few years of sobriety, education, and work have been the best of her life, she said.

My eyes turn to the small nondescript clock on the nightstand, and I am embarrassed to realize that I have slept for twelve hours straight.

This is what it has been like the whole time we have been talking on the phone, writing, and now visiting in person: me trying to get closer, more intimate, inching toward the blank details that brought me into existence, and her anxiously trying to protect me at the slightest provocation, physical or otherwise.

“It’s really hot,” she says, somewhat abashed.

Patricia smiles ruefully. “Right,” she says. “You seem like a person who does what they need to do, regardless of the consequences. I was like that once, too.”

She is looking out the window at the portly, bundled-up neighbor shoveling her walk.

I take a tentative sip of my tea, and Patricia is right, it is very hot.

This “you’re only half-Black” refrain is an idea so odious to me that I jettisoned it years ago.

This “you’re only half-Black” refrain is an idea so odious to me that I jettisoned it years ago. Yes, I am mixed, and yes, that matters, but by now I am clear that mixed is just another kind of Black.

“If you have one drop of Black blood in you in this country, the government sees you as Black,” I say, in as even a tone as I can muster.

“Yes, really. Me. Is that so hard to believe?”
I do not answer, but just continue to look at her incredulously.

It is a concise work of adoption genre fiction.

Over the course of this thirty-second oeuvre, we see the shy young adoptee slowly come out of her shell, at first hiding behind her second adoptive mom when Grandma calls, then proudly showing her a progress report from school, and finally laughing with Grandma at an old school photo of her first adoptive mom while camped out under a beautiful tent made of a blanket with a colorful ethnic print.

But right now, stepping into my grandmother’s modest foyer, I am simply looking for signs of Other Me. Of the portal. Anything will suffice: a stray curly hair, a pack of Lindt truffles on the counter.

I am carrying a pan of freshly baked dinner rolls, and Patricia has a carafe of apple juice.

She had had a brief and tumultuous relationship with my African American birth father, and didn’t think that either of them could offer a baby a decent home.

When the bonds of kinship are broken and remade, it shows you how porous and malleable they really are.

You are somebody’s daughter because a child welfare law has decreed it.

Your family has forgone the idea and reality of blood and genetics (and race, for that matter) as the determining factors of ancestry and belonging.

You do not perform kinship the way the majority of people and families you know and see in mainstream media do. For better and worse, your family formation is an aberration—which gets you thinking about other possible shapes your family could take.

And the more she pleads with them to settle down, the more boisterous they become.

The blond girl with the deceivingly placid face pumps her arms and sprints.

“Sue,” he is asking, a bit gingerly. “You okay?”

By now, the girl has started crying in earnest.

Not only does it warm her, but it makes her feel like she is in a movie, the protagonist covered in so much intrigue, you can’t even make out her face. An International Woman of Mystery.

The key to exotic matter lies in quantum fluctuations, which give empty space a kind of fizziness.

Quantum theory says that subatomic particles and their attendant antiparticles are always moving in and out of existence in empty space.

Clearly, the man lives for science. And he imparts this love to his most dedicated students.

The notion of ‘time loops’ crisscrossing a wormhole, where sideways or backward time travel occurs (without its being able to alter the future), is also a theoretical possibility.

In fact, right at this moment, she is working on a super-secret method to gather copious amounts of exotic matter.