And I said, “Grandma, you wrote ‘stop making her our problem.'”

And she said — and I want this recorded exactly, because I have replayed it about four hundred times and it is the most useful sentence anyone has ever said to me —

“Well. You always were dramatic, like your father.”

I was seventeen and unconscious. I had a hole in my head. I had not been in the room. And she said “you always were dramatic,” about a thing I did not do, in a sentence about her own text, without any awareness at all.

And I sat in that green kitchen and felt the strangest thing come up through me, which was not rage.

It was that I stopped waiting.