The first true thing

I used to write stories about very fat women falling down stairs. It was all I could bring myself to write about.

Once, I left my journal in my room while I was at school. My mother read it. She found a single sentence I had written that mentioned pants in a favorable tone. She demanded an explanation. (Pants were a no-no, you see.) She was shaking the journal, waving it about, crying about my obvious moral decay. I told her it was just a sentence.

She made me erase it from my journal.

It wasn't until after I ran away from home that I could write what I wanted. Every story was about my mom--for years. The first true thing I ever wrote was a letter that my professor told me to write to the person I hated most.

This letter has disappeared. I imagine that some facet of my mind that still fears her wakens every night to grope about under the bed and fiddle through my nightstand drawers for anything she would disapprove of. I hope it never finds the bikini in the box in my closet. I hope it never finds my heart.