They were never the mark of the damaged twin.

They were the mark of the one who loved enough to be burned, and lived, and stopped being ashamed of it.

And I want to say something about the body, and about shame, because the deepest damage my family did to me was not to my mind but to my relationship with my own skin, and undoing it was the longest and hardest work of my recovery, longer than the trial or the estrangement or any of the rest.

For twelve years, I had experienced my own body as evidence against myself — as a thing to be hidden, managed, apologized for, kept out of photographs, covered at pools and parties and every place where skin might show.