There were words: curved and long letters, cresting in geometric patterns, language combined like wet leaves on pavement. Seeing these words on the grainy book pages my mother read meant something different than pictures. Pictures were art. One of my first words was “Ingres,” the name of the French painter. My mother held a book open while she was studying portraits. I toddled close and said, “Ang.” For my parents all images were drawn to imitate space, not lines, and I knew how to draw by pressing all four of my fingers to a piece of charcoal and imagining dinosaurs. Dinosaurs ready to eat one another, dinosaurs with big oval heads, slender legs, and no bodies. For me the geometric symbols of words were not spatial but linear, and lines meant stories.

My mother would read in her consistent, soothing tone—a voice she used for calling the cat home—and sometimes there would be a deeper, growling voice for any character who might have sharp teeth. She read from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe one night before bed and as I looked over (as I always did because she held the book above us so I could see the words) I began reading aloud. She had not taught me letters but I had watched and remembered how they sounded in her mouth, how they fit inside my ears. The story expanded and the words became images of the lives I desired. I have never wanted to be inside my own body, have always been partly somewhere else, walking in lavish rooms without doors or paddling canoes in warm rivers.

After learning to decipher printed words, handwriting became the new language, rounded and inflated like rising balloons. A language that meant some myths were uncovered. The first Christmas I could read revealed that every card was in my mother’s handwriting. I read my name and was quiet. A cuckoo clock on the yellow wall ticked.  Nothing was said, because I knew if I cried Charcoal the gray cat would climb up my chest to bite my ear. My mother called her “the nanny.”

Charcoal slept on my ankles at the edge of the bed, soundless and warm. The waterbed made me feel like a water lily, floating. I did not sleep unless my mother read a novel, letting me interrupt when I knew the meaning of a word. Then she sung, “When I go to sleep/ when I close my eyes/ then I, anything I/ want to be there in the sky.” The nights this did not happen I babbled my own language without words. Muddy sounds, the whirring of diesel generators and vending machines, just to feel the throaty comfort of my own voice. People downstairs heard but did not understand. It was the undercurrent of language, an urgent poetry of sleeplessness. The cat never stirred until I fell asleep. Then she would leap down to slap and paw my Matchbox cars across the tile floor. Mornings I woke to her posed like a sphinx on my chest, squinting her yellow eyes as if she knew we each had a ritual.

When I entered school, crawling under a hole in the fence across the street, handwriting became my own. There I began practicing lines between lines, curling letters in exercises like “see the cat eat see the cat eat.” At school there was a conference with my parents to discuss how I held a pencil: all four fingers mashed against the wood. I wrote the same way I drew with charcoal pencils, the pigmented dust rising as I rendered and retooled the shapes. Doing this was a reenactment of my mother’s handwriting. I was thinking about winters. It wasn’t the Christmas tags with my name “Miles Sterling” in compressed cursive I recalled as I began writing my name. It was a week later, when the pine fragrance of the prickly tree had gone and left a dry smell like anything could ignite.  This was handwriting. This meant a secret note in my mother’s Franklin Covey day-planner. Small, muddy cursive saying, “I will take my life before this year is up.” Each January this was her New Year’s resolution, as regular as the pounding, pounding sound of a slammed door and the delicate “clink” of the lock that follows. These were my mother’s constant thoughts, her first written words of the year before children self-consciously wrote the date at school and the teacher asked about Christmas vacation.  Back at school I pretended to hold my pencil in a delicate triangle, ghosting the letters for “see the cat eat” thinking it could easily be “sea the cut feet” or how I wanted to write “See, I can’t sleep. See my clamped teeth.”

Nights I heard slammed doors and no singing, I gurgled my own language.  Mornings, after the cat blinked at me and all the cars were put away, my mother would come to my room. Her sweater close, smelling of cinnamon like in the kitchen when she made rice pudding and sang, “arroz con leche, arroz, con leche.” In her voice used for reading stories she’d say, “Can we start over?” I never knew when anything began or ended. Some days my hand flexed as though I could write her an answer in the same cursive script.