But some of us formed shadow families of our own, after all. We boarded buses, crossed whole continents on trains, or watched the lights of our old cities shrink as we climbed into the sky. We moved into apartments whose leaks and leases we would have to handle on our own; we lay awake in single beds, sensing that we’d snipped a cord not just from home but from the law of gravity itself, and if we tumbled off the planet altogether no one, for a while, might know.
