late at night my ten year old self yells at me, tears in her eyes and hands clenched in fists, demanding “how could you let this happen? how could you let him go?!” like I had any control, like eight years difference somehow made me an adult with the power to move stars and blood clots, yet I know she can’t understand something so profoundly wrong when her entire world is built upon the framework of What Has Been Therefore Always Will Be, sure she’s stood on damp porch steps and called desperately for lost cats but this loss is incomprehensible and she feels wounded, betrayed, this isn’t how things were supposed to go at all, and all I can say is “I know, I know, I know”