My mother told me to get out of her house and never come back. She said it to break me, to deploy the threat of abandonment against a daughter she had correctly identified as someone for whom abandonment was the deepest fear, and to watch that fear override everything else the way it had overridden everything else for twenty-nine years.
What she did not account for was the possibility that the fear had a bottom, that there was a depth at which even the threat of being cast out was less terrible than remaining in the place you were being cast out of. She did not account for the possibility that her most extreme weapon was also, from a certain angle, a gift.
The key to my cage, I call it now. Not because I feel no sadness about the family I did not have and may never have, but because the sadness is honest and the life is mine, and those two things can coexist in the same apartment on a Tuesday morning with good coffee and clear light, and they do.
