When I was in high school, what seems like 100 years ago, I wrote a short story called "And Then There Was Nothing..." The "moral" of this horrifying little gem was that those who strive for perfection end up with nothing at all. The plot involved two overachieving high school students trying to do well in Chemistry accidentally inventing something that blows up the world. As was my typical style at that time, the characters were based on students I knew and particularly despised for their perfectionist tendancies.

I was 14. Give me a break.

Anyway, for some reason I'm thinking about that story today.

I am not a child. And yet I am someone's child, and I know things a child should not know.

I know that my father is drinking himself to death. I know that he is impotent, and that he shits in his pants and pisses in his bed. I know that my stepmother eventually left him not because he hit her, but because he told her he'd rather die on a barstool than live with her. I know that his liver was nothing more than a little crusty ball of carbon 15 years ago. I don't know what it looks like now, but I can imagine.

I know that my grandfather was imprisoned not once, but twice, for molesting children, and that my father and stepmother let me play with him anyway, let me sleep in his house, let me sit on his lap. And I know that my sister was relieved when he died, as finally she could keep her own children away from him without making a fuss. God forbid anyone make a fuss.

I know that my father told my mother to get an abortion, and that she had an appointment and intended to keep it right up until the morning she was supposed to go in. I know she wondered for years if she made the right choice.

I know that my aunt's husband beat her. I know that my cousin is a drug addict, and that her husband is stupid, and that her baby has little chance of any sort of better life. I know that there is a cycle of poverty and humiliation crushing my people, and that distancing myself from them may not be the only way out of it, but it's the easiest.

I know that just because my family is better than some, that doesn't make everything that happened OK.

I am 25, and I know things a child should never have to know.

The woman in my passport photo is not smiling. She's wearing a sleeveless white shirt and dangly silver earrings. She has a blemish on the right side of her lower lip. She has a look about her that could pass for ardor at a glance, but is likely just sweat. She's so young. Calculating the dates makes her 26. She seems younger to me.

I know, because I remember, that she wasn't planning a trip to anywhere specific on the August morning when she stood in line at the post office, filled out the forms, and had that picture taken. She was old enough to navigate the bureaucracy and pay the fees, old enough to think about obtaining a passport, but young enough to take pleasure in doing so, even without a trip planned. She was in that in-between state of embryonic adulthood. She had the outside trappings of being an adult--a steady job, a mortgage--but she wasn't all the way there on the inside yet. Adolescence lasts longer than we think.

I could say I barely know her now, with her silly earrings and her expectations all over her face. But the truth is I do know her. She's been here all the time. She emerges with every trip to somewhere new, while making reservations or in the security line at the airport or when the plane touches down on new land. And even if I don't remember the feeling she got standing in that hot university post office, posing for that terrible picture, she does.