What they are in danger of is worse in its way, because it is slower and has no lid to lift: a whole life spent quietly shrinking, agreeing not to see, trading their own certainty for someone else’s comfort a day at a time until there is very little of them left to bury.

I was lucky.

My erasure came fast and loud and left a body still breathing to object.

Theirs comes so slowly that no one ever calls an ambulance.

If this story reaches even one of them, I want her to hear the only thing I really learned in that box, stripped of all the rest: the discomfort you keep talking yourself out of is trying to tell you something, and you are allowed to listen to it, and you do not owe anyone the pleasant fiction of your closed eyes.

But I did contradict them.