Educated

pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor,
from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to
me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.
I fashioned a new history for myself. I became a popular dinner guest, with
my stories of hunting and horses, of scrapping and fighting mountain fires.
Of my brilliant mother, midwife and entrepreneur; of my eccentric father,
junkman and zealot. I thought I was finally being honest about the life I’d had
before. It wasn’t the truth exactly, but it was true in a larger sense: true to
what would be, in the future, now that everything had changed for the better.
Now that Mother had found her strength.
The past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had
weight.