The night it all broke was the night I finally set down everyone else’s plate and discovered that my arms had been full for so long I had forgotten they were mine.

You can carry a thing so long that it fuses to you, so that setting it down feels less like relief than like losing a limb, and it is only in the days afterward, flexing arms you had forgotten were yours to flex, that you understand how much of you the carrying had been using up.

It is a humbling arithmetic, to measure how much of yourself a role had quietly consumed, and a hopeful one too, because the same arithmetic that tells you the cost also tells you, to the ounce, how much of yourself is now available to be spent on things you actually choose.

I did not get a perfect ending.