If one could peel back one's own skin and peer at that which lies within, then one might search and still not see.

There is no you and there is no me.

It's time.

You're listening to Spooked.

Stay tuned.

My mother and I, we don't often. We don't often see eye to eye, and as the years pass, I feel our chances for reconciliation, for healing.

I feel they're slipping away.

Like we're missing basic understandings of why our core values so offend the other.

And I want to understand my mother, I do.

I want to know better from where she came.

I have so very few pictures

from her younger years.

So few.

It was a rare thing

to aim a camera at a skinny brown

girl when she was a child.

But recently

a cousin sent me a gift.

A photo.

Dammit's water stain.

There she is.

A teenager beaming, relaxed with her sisters on the precipice of the unfolding of her life,

...