Swimming is exhausting.

I carry with me a toiletry kit. The star of the packing universe.

Memory, as a substance, is definitely water. It either evaporates completely, or it gets soaked into the brain sponge until the sponge gets squeezed by some unexpected something, and then the water spills everywhere. A lot of times, the something is photographs. People insist they remember intricate details of a moment because they’ve seen a picture of the family dog they never met—I swear to God I remember we were at the lake because the dog was with us and I remember him, his name was Biscuit! He smelled like dirty pennies!—when in reality Biscuit died before the person was even born. Or there’s the thing where people hear stories from other people’s lives, and the stories get repeated over and over and the water is absorbed into another sponge and then you’ve got people fighting over whose memory it truly is.

I don’t have any photographs from when I was little, except the ones Joellen sometimes took and put into my file. And I am not with the same people year after year to hear the same stories over and over, sloshing our memories around in one another’s sponges. All to say, I feel like I can safely rely on the accuracy of the memories I do have being truly mine, which for the most part move forward in long stretches of an uneventful life. A cold, slow-flowing river.

Except sometimes my memory is an ocean.

What I don’t remember, Joellen tells me, is that when I was born I was super hard to place because of the meth. But the hospital got me clean, and when I was a year old, a couple picked me up in California and brought me to Seattle. I was free to be adopted, no parental rights to fight about, and the couple told Joellen they wanted to adopt, they wanted me.

I don’t recall the move, but I remember the man and woman. I know I called them Mom and Dad and I was their only child. I remember Joellen came to visit me each week. I remember preschool and the house; I had an upstairs room with a window, and I could see water. I had a bed and stuffed animals in a wicker basket and clothes in a dresser and a closet. I remember the dad taught me to tie my shoes and the mom showed me how to lick a stamp and mail a letter, and I took baths with a toy ferry that had cars in the hull you could take out; I lined them up on the edge of the tub and stayed in the water until my fingertips wrinkled, and I remember the dad read books to me every single night.