“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

listen, and sometimes talk, and sometimes just look at the sky in the way I was already beginning to do at 16, 17. Looking up because looking outward felt safer than looking inward at a future I couldn’t quite make myself want.

I was already doing the calculation then, even if I didn’t have the language for it yet. The life being planned for me was continue reading …