I'm writing because I didn't die. They came out with a medicine and it worked. I'm healthy as a horse, the doctor says, which seems like a dumb thing to say, horses get sick all the time. So I'm not dying, and I gave you away so you wouldn't watch me die, and here we are. I've had a year to think about what that means and I still don't know. I don't think it means I was right. I don't think it means I was wrong, either, because I've seen the family you went to, once, at a distance, in the parking lot of the county building the day they took you home, and the man carried your bag and the woman knelt down in the gravel in a skirt to talk to you at your height, and I thought, all right. All right. I can stand this.
I'm not writing to ask for anything. Please understand that. I'm not asking to see you. I'm not asking you to call me anything. You have a mother and a father, and I'd guess from the way that lady knelt in the gravel that they've done right by you, and if you're reading this I'd guess they've decided you're old enough to know, which means they've done right by you about this too. Please don't be angry at them for anything. They did what I asked. It isn't their fault I asked for the wrong thing.
I want you to know three things, and then I'll stop.
The first is that you were not given up because of anything you did. You were loud and you were funny and you bit me once on the thumb hard enough to bleed, over a grilled cheese, and you were the best thing that ever lived in that apartment. You used to sit on the workbench and hand me tools. You couldn't tell a socket from a screwdriver but you'd hand me whatever was closest and say here you go, Rumble, and I'd use it, whatever it was. You called me Rumble because of the bike. I've never been called anything better.
The second is about your mother. Her name is Raelynn. She has bipolar disorder, the kind they used to call manic depression, and in 2007 nobody had caught it yet, not even me, and I should have. She loved you. I need you to hear that from somebody who was there. The night they took you from her, she wasn't hurting you. She was trying to get you somewhere she thought was safe, and she was wrong about where safe was, and she was wrong about what she was running from. That's what the sickness does. It isn't