Admit that, before you were grown, you wanted to straddle chairs and tilt your head while a painter tried to capture something inimitable in you. Now that you have straddled more than chairs, you wonder if there is anything inimitable in you. Are we ever as singular as we think we are?

Admit that you wanted God to turn His head while you made love, because you never really intended to marry, and He knows that you never mean Him harm. You may’ve dreamt of weddings but never of the rugs that would need beating once a month, the bleaching of dingy boxer-briefs, of breast-milk-encrusted bras and a lifetime of servitude. You will not come to view marriage as much different than you do now; you will not tie it in many meaningful ways to the motherhood that precedes it. You always meant to flit about without that kind of accountability. And even when you are your most lonely, even when you are penitent, even when you confess all your sins: you still do.

Admit that you did not want to comport yourself as you did, closing as quickly as a small aperture. You imagined yourself as magnifying glass, translucent, enlarging, but never entirely seen. It would not have been terrible for you to be a watery blur of unconsidered colors. You could have been what happens when pewter commingles magenta, when olive meets cornflower.

I am taking you to task. You haven’t learned. You haven’t learned. And for all your attempts at honesty, you still make yourself duplicitous when you want most to be loved.

Who are you now but the girl that you were, without so much pretending? Who are you now, but someone who lives a bit beneath herself, wants the wrong things, and hopes to raise a less apologetic woman?