Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

A life seemed so long, I couldn’t see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.

It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself and that’s what I’m after.

I am forty years old, older than my mother was then. I don’t have a daughter and I don’t know if I ever will. But if I do, we will not carry this sadness forward. I’m tired of holding it.

We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated.