and they simply witnessed it.
Nobody explained it away.
Nobody told me I had chosen this life.
Nobody told me to deal with it.
They listened.
And listening turned out to be something I could stand on.
The woman was named Patricia.
Before retiring, she had worked as an editor for thirty years.
Over coffee, she asked whether there was more than the one page.
I told her my kitchen table was covered in pages.
She asked if she could read them.
My first instinct was no.
Those pages belonged
