World has many secrets, she was aware of that. She looked at few in her attic. She spend hours digging up old photos and journals knowing her parents better. Some things made her wonder. Why was she dark and her parents fair? Why did mom have nude pictures of herself and her best friend hidden under a jewel box? Why did her dad say he was in the Marine in 1971 while at the same time he took a picture on a cruise in Caribbean next to a woman sipping Margaritas. But most of all what surprised her was an old set of documents hidden in a box of LPs. It had a birth certificate with her name on it. But the year was wrong, so was the month.
She got up sweat dripping off her forehead. She strolled to the high window of the attic looking over an old swing set that her grandparents had bought her and where she played alone, wishing she had a brother. She saw the weeds in the flower patch where she had spent so many afternoons out of school, pretending she was a flower vendor whose flowers were presented to the Presidents of the World. She had a lot of imagination then. But years of bookkeeping evaporated everything. Now everything she touched seemed like a mystery, an unsolvable piece of tangle. Like, why did that birth certificate have her name. She couldn’t fathom an answer to that. No matter how many Sundays she spent in this attic. No matter how many years past that’s all she did on her Sundays. She just couldn’t. She couldn’t explain it.
