I was mourning, in that moment, not just the loss of my parents but the loss of the parents I had spent my whole life waiting for them to become, and who, I finally understood, had never existed and never would.

There is a strange and terrible freedom on the far side of that particular death.

Once you stop hoping a person will become someone they are not, you can finally see them clearly, and act accordingly, and stop offering your heart to a door that was never going to open.

That text closed the door.

And in closing it, though it broke something in me, it also, for the first time in my life, set me free of them.

Chapter 6 — Six Months of Silence