Some part of me, the part that had been struck and told to go home, was glad to be seen reclaiming what was mine.

But glad is not the same as needing, and the test of my mother’s lesson was not whether I felt nothing on that stage.

It was whether I could step down off it and walk away whole, and I could, and I did.

I had stood in the blue light not to be seen, but because standing there was, that night, simply where the work required me to be.

And when the work was done I had come down off the stage and walked out into the ordinary dark, and I had not needed anyone to watch me do it, and that — the not needing — was the whole of what my mother had been trying to give me, with the last of her strength, from the far side of a hospital bed.