I am twenty-five years old now. I live in a city three hundred miles from Cedar Lane. I have a lease and a phone with too many emails and a dentist appointment I keep postponing. Some things do not change.
But some things do.
Aunt Dana calls me every Sunday. She is forty-eight years old and she has two children and a garden and a husband who still brings her flowers for no reason. She has never cut herself. She has never been in a hospital room with a tube in her arm. She is alive in a way that the first version of her never got to be.
My mother and Daniel live in the house on Cedar Lane. They fixed up the kitchen a few years ago and planted a garden in the back. On Easter and Thanksgiving I drive down and sit at the table with them and eat too much and laugh at Daniel's jokes.
The fol
