Sitting at my mother’s kitchen table that weekend all those years later, I recognized what I had always known—that my parents had loved each other. How much easier, I’ve often thought, to understand their separation if they hadn’t. Whatever story I wrote for myself must always begin with the story of their love, and in comparison, no love of mine could ever be as terrible or as true. Across time, my father and mother still touching through telephone wires, letters in the mail, the bones in my face, the blood that moved in me. Love could endure more than I had allowed for, I realized. Some
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