My ego and my mother’s ego are built in similar ways. Once again, I search for the edges between us, try to remind myself they are there. But there is a kind of amniotic pleasure in having trouble locating these edges, in feeling this symmetry instead, this union. How had Peter put it? So much together, but not merging. Sometimes it feels good to merge, to say—irrationally, feverishly, stubbornly—I am my mother, and she is me. Jason and the colonel must have assumed we were a family: two tall ex-hippies in their early seventies and their tall daughter. And today, in a strange way, we are: the
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