He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.

“I knew I wanted to sign with him. Here was a man who never once mentioned money. To me, that was a real businessman. It wasn’t that I didn’t need money, because I did. But to this day, money doesn’t drive me. Money isn’t what pushes me to do this or that. It’s always been about something deeper. For me, it was about dignity, about pride, about the respect I freely gave to others and expected back in return. I may have been a young girl from a rural area, but my parents taught me to value myself, to never think of myself as less than anyone else, regardless of my background or circumstances.

Writing these words 50 years after I got back on that Greyhound bus in New Mexico, shot through the heart with the knowledge that there would never be a father there, I no longer feel the furious condemnation that drove me so hard. I now see that he simply didn’t know the right questions for fully seizing the amazing gift of his one life to live. I wish I could go back in time and give him those questions before it was too late. But alas, I cannot. So instead, I offer them here to you. And I take them for my own.

And then: one loves one another and there’s so much joy to be had from the physical manifestations of love. Your father has always been beautiful for me, and even now I can see through the latticework of time how exquisite he was as a young man. I know he has pleasure in seeing me. Despite my worn-down vellies and budding widow’s hump, after all these years he still looks at me expansively. And then there is the legend. It’s the legend holding the lustre through the years of worn reality— if you make sure that nobody steals it from you, as you make sure nobody takes your things or weeds don’t overgrow your garden. If you are watchful and patient, if you have humour but can be steadfast on cardinal matters and let smaller ones fall by the wayside, all this will meaningfully assist you in holding on to love, and nourishing belief in the legend.

Quite comforting, I think, but sometimes you can do as little with good advice as with bad advice.