My family wasn’t like those families. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to show each other love. I had no doubt that my family loved me. We didn’t know how to show each other pain. We didn’t know how to comfort one another. We were shadows; a shadow of a family. When I thought about it from an outsider’s perspective, I didn’t blame my mother for taking off. I hoped, in some weird way, that she’d found a new family. I wanted that for her in the same way that I hoped that someday I, too, might find myself a new family.
