The Weight of a Small Thing
It had been in mine.
I had made myself unseeable, year by year, and no amount of him trying now could have undone that; what let him see me at last was not his effort but my absence, the plain fact that I had stepped out of the corner and stood up to my full height in a life he wasn’t in.
You cannot be seen while you are busy disappearing.
I had needed to reappear first.
I had done it for myself, and he caught sight of the result, and that was the right order of things, twenty-two years too late.
Chapter 13 — The Conversation