My elementary school friends teased me that my dad was “cute.” He has generous, weary smile lines. Tough, tired, friendly, like a cross between James Earl Jones and Che Guevara. I liked him. Yeah, I liked him a lot. No, wait, he was also an annoying pain in the ass. But if we were equals, if he wasn’t my dad, I think we’d be friends.

Bella Freeman was born Isabella Sadler on December 30 (okay, Mom’s two years older than Dad . . . ), 1963. She’s a little shorter than me, 5'3" or 5'4". When she was a bit famous it was for her singing, but she’s a poet, really, even though she never calls herself one. She even had a book published, a little volume that she said sold well in Haight-Ashbury in the late seventies. She can speak in haikus, which was actually really amazing and hardly ever gets annoying because it’s almost impossible to notice unless you count the syllables of everything she says. She can just make up poems, out of nowhere, but she stopped writing them down, which sucks.

She’s old-fashioned, even though she doesn’t think she is. She’ll say things like: I’m a feminist but really now, what kind of woman doesn’t cook? But she cooked tough. It was all about knife skills and building the muscles to whisk things to sharp peaks without stopping. We would listen to Patti Smith and the Pretenders and Heart and Fleetwood Mac and twirl and dance each other around the kitchen. Dinner was always late, and when it was really late she’d put down this old pink blanket she had and the three of us would have a midnight picnic on my parents’ bedroom floor.

She has amazing breasts. I’ve even seen photographic evidence that she breastfed me, but her tits—they make me feel optimistic about my future. Maybe it’s weird to perv on your own mom’s boobs, but it’s okay to be sort of hot for your mom if you know how to control yourself. Isn’t that what Freud said?

I used to watch her putting on lipstick before she went out. Her lips are thin. She paints them with a little brush. Her nose is narrow, her hair is jet black and silver.

My parents are alive somewhere and I might never see them again. I’m streaming, of course. It’s making it hard to breathe. I want to say that I forgive them, even though I don’t think that’s true. But I do say it, finally. More like a wish.