Five Days After the Divorce My Mother in Law Asked Why I Was Still There Until I Told Her the House Was Mine

to outlast him. That it did—that it passed through grief and a marriage and a legal dispute and a parking lot conversation and arrived here, in this house, in this room, in the quality of quiet I get to live in now—is something I have not resolved into a clean meaning. I am not sure it has one.

What I know is this: I did not let them write me out of continue reading …