I was young then. I didn’t know how beautiful and seductive my frame was. I hid and cried at times, over the high meekness of my voice. I mistook my sexy unusual accent for lack of development. I did not understand nature had planned me and the plan was as perfect as biology attempts. My mind was not lazy, only full of ignorance. I look at pictures and wonder if I did not adopt a more natural look, if I would have been a force of nature. We are all deposits of our histories and my history was a long lonely motherless road. I had to learn everything from the beginning. I was given nothing.

From the moment I met him, he seemed small. He had tiny feminine wrists and forearms. I remember disclosing my smoking cigarette habit for the first time on his back porch. Roses wound around the cheap 4x4 skeleton of the overhang like wisteria and accented the elegance of his delicate bones. He threw up that night. I was kind. I excused myself and on my way home, thought about caring for and comforting him. I wanted to save him from the loneliness in his eyes. I wanted to make him believe how wonderful he was. I wanted to believe in him. His friends thanked me. They said his grayness had disappeared. This too, I believed.

His family embraced me. They thanked me for my presence. I didn’t understand their lack of belief. I was a poor shop girl. I was his only prospect. My youth prevented me from knowing relationships were status and proof. Proof that a man would not embrace another man, kiss him long and soft and warm and take him to his bed. I was an example of heterosexuality. I had firm breasts, full lips often smeared in red lipstick and arched eyebrows. I was straight enough to be a future.

I remember fighting ideas at times, because I believed in my own mythology, his mythology and this nuclear family. My resistance was certain and burned not only bridges, but towns, churches, fields of grass and at times set a lake on fire. For the first time in my life I believed something. It was a hazy out of focus no subject something, but it was mine.

It was mine until our rough practice developed a roundness to my stomach. A tiny jumping bean, that science said my body would never carry within. In one of the most vulnerable moments I have lived, I took the mistake of empiricism to him: “You are a father.” I was from that moment exorcised. I was a non being full of trickery, demagoguery and the shade of Lilith. His purposeful spilling of seed inside of me was a trap set for my husband, so the whispers and comments were made to me by his mother and all others of similar inheritance.

Decades of time have passed. We are enemies. We are opposites. There is only a little girl between us. Even that he has taken. He will tie me to and burn me at the stake, until his parents and myth pass. He will destroy in earnest the waif he married, until he can speak on his own. I am only an image of a woman to him and a stranger. I have been as steadfast as Penelope and Hester in a constant thread to my pearl. Only paper lanterns are lit to die in the wind now and it was long centuries ago that a bad, but fragrant crop of wheat caused men to murder their sensibilities and the softer edged people of the village.