Once, my mother gave me a locket. It was not hers, she explained, but stolen long ago, from a
someone she’d envied. When I opened the locket there was nothing inside, but my mother
insisted I could not be looking hard enough.
I spent the next half hour, running my fingers against the cool base, longing to find
something – anything. It was only years later, long after her death, that I felt it:
Absence, milky thick, coating my entire being.
