Completely in the Dark

“When your parents die, you will never see them again. You might think you understand that, but until it happens, you don’t. They say that you come into the world alone and that you leave alone too. But you aren’t born alone; your mother is with you, maybe your father too. Their presence may have been loving, it may have been demented, it may have been both. But they were with you.” —Mary Gaitskill

I got 663 words into drafting this post when realized I was lying.

Maybe not lying lying, but I certainly wasn’t telling the truth about what I thought I wanted to say. Then it occurred to me that what I was avoiding saying was much closer to what I wanted to say, so … here I am. Pushing RESET.

These photos—recently digitized by my brother and, to my knowledge, the first time I’ve ever seen…