A person consumed by revenge is not free; they are still living in the house of their abuser, just rearranging the furniture.

Freedom is something else entirely.

Freedom is when the people who hurt you stop being the center of anything, when their fate stops determining your peace, when you could not tell a reporter whether their downfall was satisfying because you have genuinely stopped keeping track of them.

That is what happened to me by that ocean.

My family’s ruin did not satisfy me, because by the time it fully arrived I had already left, in the only way that matters, which is that I had stopped organizing my inner life around them.

Their prison sentences and their lost reputations were events in their lives, not mine.