Two families are still, tonight, sitting in houses I can picture, because I lived in one for seven years — houses with a room no one goes into, and a photograph that has stopped aging, and a phone that gets picked up too fast every time it rings.

I got my miracle.

They did not.

And I have had to learn to hold both of those truths at once, my joy and their unhealed grief, without letting either one cancel the other, because that is what it means to survive something like this alongside other people: you do not get to have a clean happy ending while others are still in the dark, and you do not get to refuse your own joy out of guilt toward them either.

You have to carry both.