Chapter 13: The Breakfast Table

We sat at the breakfast table without ceremony. Coffee cooled. Plates were passed. Someone laughed at something small and unimportant. Nothing needed to be addressed or repaired. No one was trying to prove anything.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t watching myself from the outside. I wasn’t anticipating tone shifts or bracing for misunderstanding. I wasn’t rehearsing explanations or softening truths. I wasn’t hoping to be seen.

I already was.

I could feel my parents there, not as judges, not as ghosts weighted with regret, but as witnesses. Quiet. Relieved. Not because I had figured everything out, but because I had stopped trying to fix what was never mine to fix.

They had lived their lives the only way they knew how. So had everyone else at the table. There were no villains in that truth. Only people moving through time with the tools they were given.

I thought of the sandcastles we built when I was a child.  How we ran farther down the beach each time the tide erased our work, laughing at the futility of it, never once thinking it was a failure.

It wasn’t.

It was the point.

Able to love.
Able to see clearly.

I let the tide take the rest.