“HOW DO YOU see the world?” my rehab therapist asked the day I arrived and again the day I left. A pattern of tragedy, respite, tragedy, I said both times. But this wasn’t always the case. “Be the wolf,” Leah recited, and once I thought I could. Once I thought I could use power, the people who had it, the men, to make me immune to loss. I had the privileges attached to health and youth and whiteness. And a wide open something I mistook for beauty. I imagine it now as an invisible mark, an absence where a father went, a fear of who I’d be without a mother. She had always been sick, and even
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