I had grown up so jealous of my peers who had letters and notes written to the nuns returned to them. It was always on their 16th birthday: the day they could choose to leave and find their family or simply leave and find work instead. For each letter, I'd sneak into the group of older kids, ignoring their size and bitter eyes just to listen to the words read aloud.

We never wanted to leave her....

Please God forgive me and may she find the life I couldn't provide...

I beg you to keep her name, my mother's name: Ophelia.

That letter had left me to wonder eternally if my name was given with love or had been arbitrarily placed in convenience. With a name like Mary, I had a sinking suspicion it was the latter. I stopped stitching it in the pink thread we were given to mark our clothing. If not even my name wasn't my own, what did it matter if the right dress came back to me?

The orphanage wasn't terrible in any one way. We learned table manners, maths, embroidery, dancing. We learned to sing and read music, and if you had a special proclivity for the reading Mrs Downs would even take you on to teach you violin or piano. There was a garden with grass rather than just stone, and stray cats were attracted to the mice hypnotised by the grain store in the shed.

We learned to make our own dolls and dresses and toys and though we cleaned and cooked, the maton we worked beneath was cheerful and, if not kind, not cruel.

What was terrible was the unspoken lack of want. What was terrible was the way children affronted at birth would try to grasp at belonging: conspiring their way into hierarchies, stepping on toes and standing on others' shoulders to reach for the nuns who could never be a mother. What was terrible was the lack of smiles even amidst all the arts, the grey weather and grey skin and grey eyes and grey clothes.

"Go away!" became my most powerful words, letting me find solace. I was rarely bullied, perhaps because even when young I was tall and strong and commanding. By the time I was angry enough to make a demand, it was listened to: "Put my doll down! Leave my book alone! That's my dinner; give me my dinner!"

With little note, I became one of the older kids with weight to throw and a wall behind my eyes that let people know they would not be let in or forgiven. One day, there was only one girl older than me. With just two months left of hope for my own, she received a letter creased and yellowed, one line smudged by damp.

Let her know that the moment I saw her face I loved her very, very much.

"I knew it," the most recent girl whispered. "I knew she loved me." The others stirred and the circle of grey pinafore dresses broke apart. Some girls walked on with looks of weary hope that they would have a letter too; others, with jaded conviction that they would have no such thing. I swallowed and wondered for myself.

Surely I would have one. It was just on the edges of my memory: a thick, firm hand squeezing my own too hard, my steps stumbling as it flung me toward a nun. A letter pinned to my pinafore that tickled the left of my chin if I moved my head a certain way. I refused to believe this arrival was a dream or a half-remembered story of someone else's.

Days ticked by in seconds: thousands of heart beats and breaths slower than dying--or so I imagined.

Finally, it was my birthday. I was lined up at breakfast the same as anyone else, at the long tables dotted with plates and ticked with sets of silverware. Grey dress after grey dress covered in grey cardigans, black shoes polished against worn floors. Tea and toast steaming not from freshness but from the chill of the building.

I'd stopped eating. I didn't have the appetite as I waited and wondered. My hands were pulled into the sleeves of my cardigan for warmth, but I remained chilled. I moved through my last day of classes ghostlike. There was nothing to say. These classes would never be relevant to me again. I would either return to a family with prayers on my lips and knees ready to beg or I would strike out and find work in a factory where even if I sang beautifully, no one would hear over the crush of machines.

At midday, after lunch and during our free time in the garden, the nun finally came for me. Sister Michael Anne, habit whipping in the same wind that the younger girls screeched and jumped rope in, shoes uncovered by the flapping of her floor-length skirts.

The letter she handed me was on creamy, thick and quality paper. I could see from the indentations the handwriting was perfect, able and steady-handed. I felt for the first time joy in a rush of blood to my cheeks, my heart pumping an extra beat to warm me.

But Sister held onto the letter for a moment as though she might never give it over. Our eyes locked for a second too long. Her gaze was soft and then she seemed at last to steel herself and hand me the letter. Her other hand gripped my shoulder with a slight, surprising squeeze. The nuns rarely touched us: only as younger girls needing scrapes cleaned and plastered.

Others gathered silently around me as though for mass.

"To the Sisters of St. Peter's House,"

My voice shook as I began to read aloud.

"Please take into your custody this girl child for as long as you should have the legal power to do so. She was born to my wife on May 2nd, 1896. She has been a..."

My throat closed, trapping my voice so that I could only swallow the words. Quickly, with sharp words, I folded the letter and pocketed it. The girls looked at me, shuffling uncomfortably but still too curious to leave; too hopeful that even orphans could be loved somewhere, somehow.

"Go away." I needed only to whisper. They shuffled off, slow and silent.

She has been a curse since. Her silver tongue has beleaguered this family, ending in the madness of my poor missing (dare I pray, not late) wife. She is a demon with a persuasive hold over all she meets. I hope to never see her again for as long as I shall live and have crossed several counties to bring her to yourselves that she may never return. That she remain afar as I wish to never see her again."

The memory itched at me just as that very letter once had, pinned to my chest.

A woman's hands shaking against my own. I had thrown a toy. I can remember it was red though not what it was.

"Come dear, it's time to calm."

"No!"

"There will be other days."

"No!"

I couldn't remember what it was even about, some foolish child's tantrum.

"I never want to see you again."

A sigh of hurt and exasperation alike.

"Just go far far far away and leave me alone!"

I had always assumed myself like so many others: fatherless by law, motherless by death. I had always hoped myself unlike so many others: mother and father somewhere far away, making their fortune while they awaited their sacrificial lamb's return.

I could remember her now, gaze going blank, not because she was an orphan bereft but through some stupor. She stood and walked, plodding. I could remember not my surroundings or even her apparition but only chasing. Chasing and chasing and calling and her moving only faster and further. Until those hands I could only just remember on the steps of the orphanage clamped down on my shoulders shook me told me to shut up and never speak again.

Instead of my assumptions and hopes, I was a monster. Instead, I had wished away that love which myself and those around me would have died for. Alone on the grass as the wind began to whip rain against my skin, I closed my eyes. In a life of bitterness, sometimes it is the punches that makes a person laugh.

And that was what I did: I laughed and laughed and laughed because screaming isn't seemly, because sometimes there is nothing left to do.

I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Because who in this world can say they've made an orphan of themselves?