Twenty years after my birth mother let go, I let go, my letter to her disappearing into a nondescript post office box.

Our mailbox at home, beyond the hemlock hedge, would have reproached me. I was unable to reconcile my words of invitation with its familiar, aluminum throat, rusted along the seams from years of mountain rain and snow. I would have stolen them back and swallowed them like I had so many times before.

I was born deep in the heart of February.

It was quiet like a library and my birth mother labored in a twilight sleep, her limbs bound, and when I took my first breath, I dared not cry, dared not disturb the peace. The adoption was set, and with it, the relinquishment.

My birth mother’s father, who was so distraught by my existence that he had proposed a late-term abortion, sent flowers and a card in lieu of his presence. The card spat at the beauty of the flowers—Congratulations, it’s a girl!—and my birth mother split from her body.

When I was twenty, my body and mind moved as one for the first time. I found myself in the library in the aisle on adoption, an aisle I had avoided all my life. The words of psychologists and adoptees whispered and needled, their voices rising, reminding me of something I had known once.

When I was young, my mother had placed a book of adoptee voices on my shelf. She thought they would revive me, make me easy and open like her, not so quiet and contained. But they hissed. I shoved them into the shadows.

My life was a cocoon—couldn’t she see? Deep in winter, near my birthday, coyotes called from the hills that belted me to the earth, and in summer, crickets churned in the brush where our yard met the wild, sending me into a deep and endless sleep. I wasn’t like other adoptees; I was lucky enough to be loved enough to forget.

I became the words I mailed, sailing into the void, and rushed home to my parents’ bedroom to confirm their continued existence—and that of the story.

I was born deep in the heart of February to a girl.

The walls of my parents’ bedroom were painted the color of the butter of grass-fed cows, the kind my mother liked. The color embodied them: salt of the earth, milk, bread, honey. Their bed frame, white and iron, curved like winter vines, finding me in the shadows as I reached for my adoption box. Bound by satin, topped with a white ribbon rose, it whispered against my skin.

To hear my mother tell it, my parents arrived in Tennessee two days after my birth, on Valentine’s Day, and when my father held me for the first time, he whispered, “What’s not to love?” Words in place of blood had stitched us together, and every year in the coldest month, we sifted through the words in my adoption box to strengthen our bonds—words borne on photocopied and faded hospital forms and daily flow sheets where the nurses, in longhand script, dutifully recorded my first stirrings.

As I pored over familiar papers, those same words wagged like tongues, angry, loud. My birth mother did not want to hold me, the nurses sang in unison. My biological grandmother cried at the viewing window in the days before my parents arrived. I had cried inconsolably.

For twenty years, I slept, wrapped in silken words. They veiled, bound, knitted, cocooned, buoyed, and worked my body, but they were not mine.

I was born deep in the heart of February to a girl of seventeen.

I wished to belong to my parents, to be all theirs, only theirs; to know who I was without the need for letters; to exist without conditions.

Once, in the deepest, coldest winter, my mother pulled me into the night and invited me to howl as if she sensed my need to speak. The moon’s face was tipped, her crater mouth parted in a permanent question: Who are you? I felt like cowering, but my mother howled. I rushed in, ever-eager to be like her, our voices tangling together, and into our screams rushed the yips and cries of the coyotes in our hills until we couldn’t tell ourselves apart.

Now, I choked on my words as they emerged like the bones of prey—my bones; the bones I had devoured in order to survive as the good adoptee; the bones I would clean and wire together into a new existence.

I was born deep in the heart of February to a girl of seventeen.

She is my mother.

I am her daughter.

I am awake.