“Why’s that?”

“Because for thirty-two years,” I said, “I was drowning, and I didn’t even know it.

Not in the fountain.

In them.

In their expectations, their comparisons, their endless quiet insistence that I was less.

I was going under a little more every year, and I had been under so long I thought that was just what breathing felt like.

And then my father pushed me into actual, literal cold water, in front of everyone, and something about the shock of it — the sheer, undeniable clarity of it — woke me up.

I climbed out of that fountain, and I realized I had spent my whole life drowning in something far colder, and that I did not have to anymore.