Mare is who I am to the handful of people who stand next to me in the dirt, and I have learned that the second kind of name is worth ten of the first.

The world’s respect kept me company for thirty years and then walked me to a door and left.

These people will not walk me to a door.

That is the whole difference, and I did not understand it until a teenager with a bucket started calling me by a name my own mother never used, and I answered to it, and felt, for the first time in a year, like myself — a self I’d had to lose everything to find.

I had thought, at my empty planner in June, that I’d had my life and it was over.