I stood on the ambulance ramp for a while and let the morning come up, and I thought about the strange arithmetic of the night.
I had lost a husband and a marriage and a family, and I felt lighter than I had in years.
That is the thing no one tells you about leaving something that required your disappearance: it does not feel like loss.
It feels like a held breath finally let go.
For six years I had been slowly folding myself smaller to fit a story other people found convenient, and the folding had happened so gradually that I had stopped noticing the ache of it, the way you stop noticing a sound that never stops.
And now, standing in the first light, the sound had stopped, and the silence where it had been was enormous and clean.