And we were, the two of us, finally and completely free.

Free is a bigger word than people use it as.

For most of my life I’d thought of freedom as the absence of a cage, and I’d never felt caged exactly, so I’d never thought the word had much to do with me.

I understand it differently now.

I had been carrying things for so long — the cover, the silences, the grief I couldn’t name, my family’s low steady verdict on my worth, the endless work of being smaller than I was so that other people could stay comfortable — that I’d stopped feeling the weight of them the way you stop feeling clothes you’ve worn all day.

Freedom, it turned out, was setting all of it down.