In April, two years after the wedding I wasn’t invited to, I finished the table’s first refinishing—sanded out the worst of the rings, left a few because erasure is not the same as growth, rubbed in oil until my hands smelled like oranges and the future. I hosted dinner and no one asked for money and no one brought drama because I don’t invite drama to dinner, and Mina brought a spoon that Jonah carved and said, “A spoon is a boat for broth,” and we ate soup with bread that mapped the city in seeds, and Amber said, “Your life is boring as hell now,” and I said, “I know,” and she said, “Thank God.”
When nostalgia tries to leech sense out of me—when I see a boy in a letterman jacket fling a ball with an ease that still looks like promise and a girl who could have been me sit alone on a set of stairs running the math on what her love will cost—I say out loud the sentence that saved me: “Sacrifice doesn’t buy gratitude.” Then I add the sentence that built me: “Boundaries are the only receipt you need.”