Sometimes all you need is to walk around a 6-block radius of your neighborhood over and over for an hour while airing all of your grievances and anxieties with slightly-more bravado-than-necessary to your mother. You become artful in your obstinance. She will affirm your superiorities, quash your insecurities, both of you will begin to use profanity with abandon. She will tell you about her trip the dermatologist and you will say, “was he a DICK or something?” when she tells you how he burned her skin off in four precancerous places and she will say, No he was mild-mannered, and then you will tell her your worries about the gyno and she will say, Be careful, sometimes they stick a finger up your butt!” and you must pretend horror and decide whether to circle your block one last time or ask politely about your sister without really pressing the issue because God knows we can’t handle that nonsense on top of everything else.

What you’ll be left thinking about is the way she brought up that when you were a teenager the rest of the family was afraid to talk to you in the morning for fear you would yell at them; that they had to wait to see what kind of mood you were in. “Well, I’m not like that anymore,” you’ll say, and “I know…,” she’ll say and you wonder why she brought this up except maybe togive you an opportunity to apologize for being an inconsiderate teenager and now you wonder if youhave really healed yourself or if now  your lack of consideration just shows itself in newer, smarter ways. And then also you wonder why your sister must move to Chicago without a plan or a place to stay, and how that affects you and then makes you aware of your selfishness, and then later, how that not only gives you by proxy anxiety but also highlights your own foundationless beginnings, gives you fear knowing that you were built to flee just like her, how the desire to start out on your own without a plan or the reassurance that you’ll be okay is embedded deep inside you, despite the fact that all you want now and lately is to know that you will be okay, for someone to tell you that no matter what, no matter how ill-prepared you seem to be for all this living you are doing, that never stops feeling like trying rather than just being, that it will really all turn out okay.