Page 45 of To the Moon and Back

DELLA TO BE FEARFUL OF THE NIGHT

Senior Spring

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Dear Lucy,

I owe you an email and this isn’t it. I’m not going to send this, but I’m writing it, maybe to psych myself up for the real one. (The professional one, probably short, where I won’t shake out the sheet of my soul and show it to you.)

It was very kind of you to write me those recommendation letters for PhD programs, and I meant what I said in my thank-you card.

You believed in me and put time into preparing me for a life in the biological sciences.

You guided me from animal behavior to marine biology to the Mariana Trench to the frilled shark, to the oceanography professor down the hall.

And even then, when you could have just handed me off to Prof. Hardiman—you stayed.

Whenever I think about rejecting the offer from UC Santa Barbara, rejecting the PhD adviser you convinced to take me on, I feel sick. I’m too ashamed to tell you what I’ve decided, so I haven’t yet.

I remember you telling me about your own PhD program, all the freedom and independence, the years you got to study the visual patterns of wolf spiders.

I realized you were the only person in the world studying that tiny bit of knowledge for the rest of us—that it didn’t have to be big, but it was yours .

No one could take that away. You have a whole world that’s completely mysterious to me (read: Are you gay?), but you’re a professional, so you’ve never told me anything by mistake.

I decided a long time ago not to share any of this. At least, not with you. Definitely not with my girlfriend. But I thought it might help to write it down?

I came out to my parents in my sophomore year, on the last day of winter break.

They said I wasn’t their daughter anymore.

(My dad said this to me. My mom sat next to him on the couch and held his hand while he said it.) I didn’t tell anyone, because then I’d have to hear someone say something asinine like, “Didn’t they make a whole fucking thing out of wanting to be your parents?

” I didn’t want people to think they were any less my parents than other parents, even when that was exactly what they were saying.

In one of our thesis advising meetings a few weeks later, I cried in your office about children.

How I wanted them someday and couldn’t have them, now that I’d become a lesbian.

I thought you would understand that, because you’re the one who taught me about the importance of genetic kinship in the animal kingdom.

(And because I think you’re gay?) What I couldn’t tell you was that I wanted children, and my parents didn’t want me .

You said that my impressions of GLBT family-building were “obviously incorrect,” and you gave me half the chocolate bar you kept in a drawer in your desk.

It was horrible, bitter, no milk or sugar at all.

Twenty percent of the proceeds went toward saving the rainforest. You said you believed there were many things you’d taught me about in the animal kingdom, like Christmas Island red crabs cannibalizing their young, that I did not seem to have taken as instruction for my life.

You told me about a class being offered on assisted reproductive technologies, which I registered for. The professor was a man with one earring, and two classes in he said (casually, and to the whole room) that he was gay. (Are you?)

I told everyone my parents were missionaries abroad and I had nowhere to go till they came home.

I spent two summers with my girlfriend in Oklahoma, which my parents would never have allowed if they were still trying to parent me.

I spent one Christmas with my friend Sam’s family in Kansas.

(Sam didn’t believe the missionary story for a minute, and his giant family treated me like the second coming of Jesus, even though they had real hardships of their own.

They brought me tea and cookies and tissues while I lay sobbing under their Christmas tree for a week.

It pisses me off a little, still, that my girlfriend has never suspected a thing.)

The first summer in Oklahoma, I emailed my bio-dad Matthew and asked to see him.

I wore a sleeveless shirt with a detached buckskin collar I’d learned to fully bead myself, and a silk skirt.

My girlfriend’s sister had embellished it with ribbons woven into each other like a basket.

Matthew picked me up with his new wife in the car, and they took me to Burger King.

I sat in my plastic chair in my best clothes, because I thought he was taking me to…

not Burger King? And Matthew let his new/pregnant wife go on about “the good parts” of the Iraq War.

The second year, Matthew left his new/postpartum wife at home with his new whole-ass child, whom I haven’t made myself meet despite having always wanted a sibling.

Matthew wore a flannel shirt and unstained jeans and took me to a Mexican restaurant.

He ordered us main courses but also appetizers and a dessert, flan that we shared while a Mariachi soloist sang over a CD player on a small stage in the corner.

I was so relieved that the wife and the baby weren’t there.

I wanted to tell Matthew everything, all the things I’m pretending to tell you now, but I didn’t. I was scared I’d lose him, too.

For the two years and three months that my Utah parents weren’t speaking to me, they only communicated in two ways: (1) They paid my tuition and kept me on their debit card in my old name, which felt both manipulative and miraculous, and (2) They sent books to my campus PO Box:

Born That Way?

My Battle with Same-Sex Attraction

Understanding and Helping Individuals with Homosexual Problems

I waited them out. I don’t know if you would have had a braver solution for that, or if you’ve ever had to deal with something like this (Are you gay?).

For two years and three months, I didn’t engage.

I threw their books away. They tracked down an old friend of mine from LDS summer camp, Ada, a twenty-one-year-old, formerly gay girl who went to a retreat (read: conversion therapy) and now has a husband and a baby.

She’s a blogger and a public speaker. She wrote me a long letter about the retreat and how, even though she’d been scared to go, it had helped her.

She said my parents had told her to tell me that, if I went, they would pay for it.

I set the letter on fire in the bathroom sink. The smoke alarm went off. It was six in the morning, and we all had to stand on the street with coats over our pajamas until the fire department gave the all clear. No one knew it was me.

(I’ve mentioned my girlfriend to you a few times, in a professional way, when it seemed casual and relevant.

But I never told you I broke up with her just before the Christmas I spent crying in Kansas.

I got back together with her, too. I got back together with her after the Columbia shuttle disaster, which was when I read that letter from Ada.)

Last month, my parents called me. They’d suddenly realized I was almost done with school and starting a whole life after that, and I guess they didn’t want to miss it.

My dad cried into the phone, and I remembered that someday they’d be dead.

I said they could come to graduation. I told them a few things I thought they should know, like my plans for next year, which they were careful not to react to.

My girlfriend won a Fulbright for a year in Russia.

I’m supposed to go with her and work as one of many assistants in a lab in Moscow—nine hours from the Baltic Sea, where there are no frilled sharks.

I haven’t told you about the lab yet, because I know you’ll ask whose lab it is and I’ll say Dr. Dmitri Fedorov, and you’ll sigh and look out your office window—like I am just another disappointment, like it is exhausting to try to build anything for young people—and you’ll turn back to face me and say, “Who?”

All my life, things have been taken from me.

Decided for me. I’ve had to fight for so much, even my own name.

I hold my girlfriend’s niece in my arms and I know exactly what I want.

A child, the kind of family I could love and depend on.

Someone who sees me, exactly as much as I choose to let them. Someone who stays.

Lately I’ve been thinking back on my life.

(Please don’t laugh at me for doing that.

I know I must seem young to you, but I have had a life.) It’s like the volume on other people’s voices has been turned up from the start, and they have only gotten louder.

When I do have a chance to think, it’s often because someone else has asked me questions.

They’ve sat quietly enough, for long enough, to listen to me, and they have turned down the dial on everything else. Does that make sense to you?

You have done that for me. So has my girlfriend, in her own way. She writes out a possible world for us, a path to a life where I am not left behind. She says we can have a baby someday, together. That I can choose how and when.

For all her faults, for all the ways she can’t see past herself? My girlfriend has never left me, and I feel sure she never would.

Declining the PhD programs, going to Russia—I understand what it means to make that sacrifice. If I choose to take what she’s offering, I will give something over of myself. Something I worked for—that you worked for, when I couldn’t imagine it yet.

You would say this is a terrible choice. The wrong one. Short-sighted and na?ve, irresponsible, reckless. You will say all that, I’m sure, when I get up the nerve to really tell you. But if it is, let’s say, a terrible choice—it’s still mine.