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him an absent stroke as I walked past and turned left toward the dining room.
    We sat at a table that my mother and I used as a dining area when we ate and a workstation when I had school projects. It was a fairly large, square table that had been painted white, but there were several spots where daily use had started to chip the white paint away, revealing layers of different colors on top of the original coat – whatever that might have been. One area looked almost like a cross-section of a Jawbreaker candy – with its concentric and rainbow colored rings, though my idle or nervous hands had helped along that more excavated section whenever I sat at the table to do homework or have a serious talk with my mother. Historically, the more nervous I was, the more frantically I dug. I learned that night that the first coat of paint was yellow.
    “I’m so glad you’re home, sweetie. I was worried I’d never see you again.” She had begun to cry as well. “Where did you go?”
    “I … I don’t know … I don’t know what happened.” My fear of the whole event being ineffable was coming true.
    “What do you mean you don’t know what happened? Where have you been? Oh, look at you. You’re filthy!” She surveyed me now that we were in better light. “Oh God! Your feet!”
    I looked down and winced. The tops of my feet were caked in a thick, dark coat of my own blood that had already begun to crack with the pattern of damaged glass. As I moved my feet against the linoleum, I could feel that the blood was acting as an adhesive, and I could hear the sound of my skin peeling free from the floor as I lifted them.
    “You went into the woods? Baby, we’ve talked about this. I can’t believe you.”
    “Mom, I didn’t! I don’t know what happened!” I protested.
    This was quickly becoming an argument, and neither my mother nor I was feeling up to it.
    “It’s okay … It’s fine, honey. Just don’t ever do this again, okay? I … I’m not sure me or my shins could take it …”
    A little laughter broke through my sobs, and I smiled a bit. “Well, I’m sorry for kicking you, but why’d you have to grab me like that?”
    “I was just afraid that you’d run away again. You had just come home; I wasn’t about to let you run off again after what you wrote!”
    I was confused. “What do you mean?”
    “We found the note you left on your pillow,” she said, and pointed at the piece of paper that the police officer was sliding across the table.
    I picked up the note and started to read it as my mother and the police officer walked into the kitchen. The note said that I was unhappy and that I never wanted to see her or any of my friends again. It was a “running away” letter. While the policeman exchanged a few words with my mom, I stared at the letter. I didn’t remember writing any letter. I didn’t remember anything about any of this. But there were many times when I would do things at night that I couldn’t recall.
    I kept reading the letter as I thought about how I would sometimes use the bathroom without remembering getting up, or would wake up and be so tired that I didn’t remember the ride to school. But this was different. This was wrong. Even if I sometimes went to the bathroom at night and didn’t remember, or even if I could have gone into the woods on my own and gotten lost – even if all these things were true, one thought repeated endlessly in the background of all the other questions and doubts that filled my mind:
    This isn’t how you spell my name … I didn’t write this letter.

Balloons
    When I was five years old, I went to an elementary school that, from what I’ve come to understand, was really adamant about learning through activity. The school was part of a new program designed to allow children to rise at their own pace, and to facilitate this, the administration encouraged teachers to come up with inventive and engaging lesson plans. Part of the underlying rationale, I