We do not get to keep the house.

We do not get to keep our parents, or undo the things they did, or the things we did back, or the years we lost to being too wounded and too proud to pick up a phone.

All any of us gets to keep, in the end, is each other, and even that only if we choose it, actively, against the pull of every old hurt, again and again, on purpose.

I did not know that at twenty-five, or thirty-five, or even at forty-four, sitting alone through my own divorce with no family to call because I had thrown my family away to protect a wound.