We walked in, our footsteps echoing, sunlight coming through the stained glass in colored bars across the oak pews.

I stood at the back, exactly where I had stood a year before, and looked at the front row.

It was empty.

But it was a different emptiness than the one that had nearly broken me a year before, and the difference is the whole of what I learned.

A year ago those seats had been empty against my will — a hole torn in my wedding by people who chose, deliberately, not to fill it, and every inch of that emptiness had been a wound, a question, a verdict on my worth.

Now the same seats were empty by my own choosing, and they were not a wound at all.