strength
Anthony immediately verified the only facts I knew about my father. “He was born in Egypt. He left your mother before you were born. He was a brilliant Physicist.”
He followed up these statements with what I was unaware of. Things I may have not been ready to hear. “Your mother never told him she was pregnant with you. He was in a fatal car accident eleven years ago.”
A warmness covered me from head to toe. The lights in the church flickered. Anthony smiled at me. And somehow I understood that what he was telling me was the only information that would enable me to move forward.
I had spent weeks of the previous months in a depression that I refused to acknowledge. If you acknowledge something, if you accept its presence, we believe this gives it power to grow. So I suppressed it. I acted like losing all contact with my 
mother didn’t cross my mind once a day. I pretended that the wonder of who my father was didn’t keep me awake at night.
I told myself your perpetual absence wasn’t slowly killing me, turning off all desire in me to complete the strings of karmic tasks necessary to reach you.
Were you thinking about me? Didn’t you wonder where I was?
I left the church with Anthony. He invited me to live with him. I agreed to move into his apartment but said I needed a month’s time.
Everything was about to change again. Somehow I needed to prepare.