The Piece

Prologue

Every story has its villain; my story has two.

The first wears the face of my mother. It would have been easier if she had always been cruel, if I could place her firmly as an antagonist. But the truth is not that simple. There was a version of her who was kind, who felt familiar, who I loved. That version is gone. What remains is someone I cannot hate, because how can you hate a stranger? I simply no longer recognize the villain who wears such a familiar mask.

The second villain is harder to categorize, but far more dangerous. It is not a single person, but the system that claims to protect children and families: the American family court. A system you would expect to be impartial, humane, protective—and instead wilfully blind, perpetuating harm and damage.

This book is my truth. Names have been changed, but nothing here has been exaggerated or dramatized. Another person might tell this story differently; this is how it lived in me. It is not meant to be a sob story—I want to make that clear. I’ve lost all sadness; now all that is left is anger. I ask you not to waste too much anger on the first villain, for she cannot help herself, but instead turn the hate into something useful.

Anger does not have to destroy. It can be poured out like water. It can nourish the seed I am planting here. If this story grows into anything, let it grow into change.

Chapter 1 – London Dearest

I never truly remembered my time in London. Between the fleeting ages of two and five, the memories were fragments at best—flashes of color, scent, and sound, barely graspable. It wasn’t until later, after much of my childhood had been spoiled, that the pieces began to return. Sometimes I wonder if they were real, or just a soft lullaby my mind conjured to lull me back to sleep.

I remember the birthday cake. It was gray. Or grey, at the time. I must have been three or four. It was a little cake that had been simple enough. To my memory, the cake was covered in a silky fondant, and it was topped with a character. Some sort of short-haired cartoon cat with a big smile and green eyes.  It was comically large, the smile. And the cake. I suppose the world as well. At that time, there were endless possibilities—solely because the world was so vast, so unknown.

I like to think that’s why I hold on to its memory so tightly, because then, life still felt endless. The boundaries of the world were invisible, the possibilities infinite. I can’t remember who handed me my slice, or if there were candles, or what language my birthday song had been sung in. I don’t even remember the taste. What I remember is the image: a child staring at a gray cake with a smiling cat on top, convinced that the universe was large and waiting.

Of all my years in London, of all the fragments that have drifted back to me, this is the one that feels most certain. This is the memory I return to when I want to remind myself who I was before the shadows began. Before the villains. Before the courts. When the world was still wide and a single slice of cake could fill it.

Of course, the cake is not the only memory; others come in bursts, soft-edged scenes, as though I am watching them through sea glass.

I remember needing to retrieve my mother’s phone from her office. I remember her switching off the television and pulling my coat on to me. I found myself so thrilled with the prospect of hiding something so simple as pajamas underneath a coat. No one would know. A small secret. A lie. A secret.

Halfway through the walk, we realized the phone had been left at home all along. The trip had been pointless, a stroller dragged along for nothing. Yet to me, it was magic—the city buzzing around us, my secret pajamas like a hidden shield. The mistake was just a mistake; it hardly mattered. What mattered was that I had walked through London at night with something tucked away just for me.

I also remember my first pet. A fish, orange and trembling in its glass bowl. Goldie the goldfish (the name auspiciously chosen). I remember laughing as I tapped on the glass. “Hello Goldie!” I would smile. I used to press my face so close to the glass that it fogged. I was convinced Goldie could see me, convinced she knew me. She sat on a small coffee table.

Looking back, that fish lasted a significant amount of time. A very suspicious amount of time.

Turns out, my dad would return to the same pet store every time someone forgot to feed poor old Goldie, or the water turned too cold, or simply because fish are fickle beings. My one pet had in truth been a multitude, a lineage. A quiet army of Goldies, each slipping into the other as if they had always been the same fish. My first pet was never singular. It was a succession, a secret my parents kept, and perhaps the first lesson that some kinds of love are maintained through illusion.

And then there was rain.

It came down in torrents, in sheets that hammered the windows and filled the gutters. I remember the smell first, the wet asphalt, the cold bite of it on my skin when I pressed my face to the windows. Then the sound of a relentless and hypnotic rhythm that seemed to fill the entire flat.

“Do you have many memories of England?” one could ask.

“Rainy days and yellow boots!”

Even now, when I think back, I see London through the eyes of a child, and I remember that everyone was once a child: small, vulnerable, endlessly curious. It is my belief (to many people’s disdain) that no one is inherently bad, but that people are shaped by circumstances, by fear, by the world pressing down on them. I try to think of my mother in that way. Perhaps the world hurt her in ways I cannot comprehend, and she had learned to retaliate before she learned to forgive.

And yet, there are actions you cannot excuse. There are moments where even love, or loss, or fear becomes a poor justification for hate. I will not pretend otherwise.

But I hold on to these London memories—the cake, the Goldies, the rain, the yellow boots, the blueberries & lentils, the animated screens—as a reminder of what is possible and of what innocence felt like before the world demanded it taken. They are a fragment of a self that still exists, though I fear that fragment lives drowned now.

“Bye-bye, little fish,” I can say for the last time. “Bye-bye.”