Truth

open the room of my mind
search for me
within faded

doubt
listen to words
sing

My birth
There was once a girl named
Alethea

her heart sparked with truth

My mother always told me she found my name, Alethea, in a book. In my child-mind I created a tome perfumed with age, adding gilded pages over the years. Sometimes I imagined stories, filled with strong and beautiful goddesses, and smiled with the thought that I was held inside.

“It’s Greek,” my mother told me, “for truth.”

When I opened the book inside the room of my mind, I watched the pages unfold like the wings of a butterfly, and waited for a girl named for truth to manifest into form.

I never doubted the existence of this book, until one winter afternoon when I was thirty-six. That day, alone in my New Hampshire home, I cupped a phone…