To the woman who had me,

I don't really know what to call you, so I'll just start.

I'm not angry. I want that at the very top, because for a long time I was, and if you ever read this you should get to skip the part where you brace for it. The anger just wore out. What's left is mostly questions and they've gone soft.

I tap my fingers when I'm nervous, all four of them, like I'm playing a little run on a piano. Do you? I can't whistle, not one note, people have tried to teach me and given up. I always wonder if that's a you thing. There's a photo in the file but it's half turned away, so over the years I've sort of built a face out of the part I can see.

They told me you were young. That you let me go because you loved me. I've turned that one over a lot, because it's such a hard kind of love to picture, the kind where the loving and the leaving are the same single thing.

I had a good life, I want you to have that part most of all. Two people chose me on purpose. I'm okay.

I still think about you on my birthday, though. I figure it might be a bigger day for you than it is for me. I hope it isn't a sad one. I hope wherever you are you're alright, and that I cross your mind now and then, and maybe someday we get to find out the rest of it.

Or maybe this is the whole of it. Maybe writing it down was the thing I actually needed.