Not loud, not violent — silent.

A door that had stood open my whole life, the door through which I had always, despite everything, hoped for my family’s love, swung quietly shut, and behind it settled a cold and total and unbreakable finality.

I did not scream, or weep, or reply.

I simply understood, all at once and forever, a thing I had spent thirty-odd years refusing to see: that the people I had called my family were not, in any sense that mattered, my family at all.

And that I was, and had perhaps always been, alone among them.