It's the 1970's. Pink Floyd, Queen, The Ramones and Led Zeppelin are in their prime. (For those precious few of you who are avid music history buffs, emo is also born and has its fifteen minutes of attention, but that is debatable and hardly relevant.) Europe is piecing itself back together, shuffling out the ashes of World War II. Communism is ablaze in the Eastern Bloc. The Pope is Polish, Capitol Hill is embroiled in the Watergate scandal, and sex is revolutionized through the marvel of contraceptives.

It is around this time that she packs her bags and leaves the four room apartment in the flat where her parents live. The one in the middle of the city, the one with the sleeply linden trees swaying in the afternoon breeze, the one with the swingset children play on, the one with clothes lines strung up across the buildings like housewives' spiderwebs. There are no wheels on suitcases yet, so she carries each bag down the steps to the taxi waiting below. Old women peer at her from behind lacey white curtains, whispering in the language of the old world. The words sound like water and leaves and twigs over mossy stones in a brook.

Czy ona będzie zwracać? Z dziewczyną jak ona, kto poznaje?

She is nineteen and small with long brown hair and gypsy eyes, wooden bangles and silver rings, a scarf at her throat. She could be a dancer, she could be a lover, she could be a multilingual biology student at the University. She is all these things. And she is going to the airport, she is showing the officials her blue bound passport, she is getting on a plane. She is pressing her face against the glass window, arms crossed next to a man reading a newspaper in Russian. She is arriving in the States. She is tired and she is jet lagged when she first sets foot here. She is my mother. She is half of me, in another life before this one.

When she came here in the seventies she was nineteen and she got engaged to my father. There are a lot of blanks in the story I don't know about. Like how long she was here, or why it was that she went back to Poland and didn't return for another six years. Once I found a love letter in the basement, in my father's penciled scrawl. I was foolish enough to show it to her, and she took it away, and I never saw it again.

We all want to believe that we are products of true love, that we are the children of a sepia photograph romance. Maybe we are, and maybe we aren't, and maybe the truth is that we are all just what happens when two lives get tangled enough to create more life.

When I ask my mother about her engagement, she has hardly anything to say. I'm eighteen and I'm curious about the shadows she's left behind.

"What do you want me to say?" she asks. "I was young and foolish. I was too young. I made bad desicions."

I'm leaning against the kitchen counter with my arms crossed, watching her pour herself a bowl of soup from the stove. The clock blinks 11:43 PM.

"And six years later when you came back, you were still young and foolish, because you actually did marry him that time."

"Yes," she says without hesitation, confirming that my existence is a product of her mistakes. "I was."

This all gives me a lot to think about, mostly how a propensity to travel great distances seems to run in my blood. This makes me a feel a little better, in the small way that understanding some things are just out of your control can make you feel better. This also makes me feel a little nervous, and a little excited, because I've got a lot of living to do. And this all makes me feel very confused, because I don't know enough about my future yet, and I really don't know if any of her past matters, aside from a writerly compare and contrast viewpoint.

And most of all, this makes me wish for a place in a sepia photograph.

But don't we all wish for that?