I walked across the stage and looked for my parents in the seats where they had been and found the seats empty. My mother said later: we saw you walk, we just didn’t realize you hadn’t been called yet. We saw you in the procession. That was the same thing, wasn’t it. I said: fine.
When I received a regional business award at twenty-eight, the kind of award that is given at a dinner with speeches and other businesspeople in the room who are the kind of people I had spent years working to be taken seriously by, they did not come. Brooke was going through something. I did not ask what. I said: fine.
The fines accumulated into a particular kind of knowledge, the knowledge of someone who has understood that the thing they are reaching for is not going to be handed to them, and who has had to decide what to do with that understanding.
