I didn't know...

...I didn't know that one day I arrived at Hong Kong I would be lured into a dressmaking shop by a broad-shouldered woman who would offer me a cold glass of seltzer. That I would leave with three new dresses to accommodate my expanding belly, and that this woman, Allegra, would become my friend.
I didn't know that during the fourth month of my pregnancy I would take a tram to the top of Victoria Peak, where I would borrow a pair of binoculars from an Australian man so I could make sense of the shapes below. I would end up marrying this man, a gentle and slow-moving man who worked at the embassy. He would know nothing about my past - only that my father was named Richard and that my mother had died when I was fourteen. Together we would raise my daughter in an apartment overlooking the bay. From a young age, we would tell her the truth about her father - that he was a good man, a philosophy professor, that one day she could travel to New York and meet him.
I didn't know that on hot summer days, we would walk down to the beach and swim in the welcoming water. That we would dig holes in the sand, pretending to be digging to America. I didn't know that I would be so successful at becoming someone new. I was not different - I knew who I was and what had happened - but still, in the eyes of my husband and child and everyone I would come to know on the other side of the world, I was neither victim nor the product of an act of violence.
And when I whould hear people say that you can't start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must. I would go months without thinking of Pankaj, of my father, of the frozen white river where I was made. Sometimes my daughter would pretend her dolls were ill and treat them with various remedies - a warm bath, soup, affection. I would think of Anna Kristine then, and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though hiding a beating heart.

from : Let the northern lights erase your name by Vendela Vida