The morning is coming up green in the glass, and I am not furniture, and I never was, and I go out of this world at last as myself.

And if you are reading this — you, whoever you are, holding these pages after I have set down my pen for the last time — I want the final thing in your hands to be not grief for me but a question for yourself, because I did not reclaim my name and tell my story so that anyone would weep over a dead schoolteacher.

I told it so you would check your own hands, right now, while there is so much more time in them than there was in mine.

Where have you gone quiet to keep a peace that costs you?

What did you stop wanting because wanting it felt like taking up room?

Whose comfort have you been tidying at the expense of your own one life?