If I could not find belonging in my story of my father, in my grief, where could I find it? If I belonged nowhere and to no one, then what was I? Who was I?

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the fact that I had multiple selves, or a divided self, and that I needed to behave differently with the different groups of people that made up my life. All people do this to some extent, but some must be more skillful at it than others.

I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

The space between the family in the photograph on my dresser and what became of it is gaping and largely unknowable. My parents rarely spoke of each other. They rarely acknowledged that the family in the photograph ever existed. My father died before I was old enough or brave enough to ask him all my questions about the end of our family. Once or twice, we stumbled onto the topic, but those conversations were terse and awkward. I worried that he would take my curiosity for ingratitude, that he would think the life he had given me was not enough. My mother, when we were still speaking, would reveal only scant details. I did not push her. Our relationship was too fragile. And, always, below us, vibrations moved through solid rock.

When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.

A story is a flashlight and a weapon. I write myself into other people’s earthquakes. I borrow pieces of their pain and store them in my body. Sometimes, I call those pieces compassion. Sometimes I call them desecration.