Stuck

If it is possible to remain still in motion, that is where the story of my reunion with my birth family both stays and moves. Adoption is Newton’s fourth law: Every story in a state of stillness remains in a state of stillness even as it moves. My story is still, but my life moves. What is there to say to that? Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, but light does.

To some extent, I’ve returned to where I’ve always been. I think of the photographer’s backdrops in the commercial portrait studio, pulled down as needed, rolled back up when not. Adoption is currently tucked away. Instead, I’ve pulled down the familiar backdrop of my childhood in front of which I almost always pose(d) content.

We hardly talk any more, my birth parents and me. There are no plans to see one another again. If it happens, it happens; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Galileo called it inertia. My last words to my birth brother, in an email nearly eight months ago, were “Never mind!” Out of context, it seems rude, but it wasn’t—it was just that: “Never mind!” When you take a photo, you’re not worried about the audio, right? It’s the light that matters.

Never mind any of us, in fact. Where we have been, where we are, where we are going—all of that remains tucked out of sight while we go on living the lives we were living before we knew who we were.

Of course it’s not the same. It can never be the same. Now we live knowing full well who we are. The story absorbs this knowledge and the stillness. “Being stuck” simply becomes a part of it.

I can say it doesn’t matter, but it does.

Oh, never mind.

Just know: I’m still here, stuck and moving, silent and writing.