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went through broke all that. To tell you that I cared when you left, that I’ve cared this whole eleven years that we haven’t spoke, that would be a lie. It would be kinder to let the separation stand unbridged. To have my own silent moment of reflection on our relationship. To say a prayer for your mother without telling you about it. To not seek that validation to make myself feel better about anything. Let Tim grieve in peace.

I was struggling to maintain this illusion that I could be aspirational. I’d taken a part time job at a credit union as a teller.

They made us call ourselves MSR’s. We were member service representatives, not tellers. Kind of like when I took that dead-end job selling bougie vacuum cleaners and they insisted we call it a home air filtration system; as if anyone would leave a vacuum running for hours to purify a room, those were the same folks whose children are now buying farts-in-jars after all. The thought of a running vacuum cleaner, still in the center of the room, cats pissing themselves from the torture, dogs barking and howling along in anguish, TV turned up so the neighbors can hear it, and this turbine roar cutting out a swath of the audible spectrum. Unrelated story, I guess.

So, I was an MSR at a credit union. The banks were suing, at the time, because credit unions were so unfair as to be growing. Y2k was on everyone’s mind. Back to zero. I was also dropping out of college in the most painfully slow way possible, by registering for