It was too honest to survive.

And in being unable to explain it away, I was finally forced to see all the years of cruelty behind it that I had spent so much effort explaining.

Theresa meant it as the final humiliation, the ultimate reminder of my place.

It was, instead, the one gift her contempt ever gave me: a cruelty so undeniable that it broke, at last, my four-year habit of denying.

I have kept, from that whole ordeal, a strange and genuine gratitude toward that bare white plate.

It fed me nothing.

And it gave me everything.

It gave me back myself.