By the January of 2024 it lived on his side of the garage and I had to ask.
And asking is the whole mechanism. That is the thing I did not see while it was happening.
Every single item went the same way. It became normal, and then it became his, and then I was a person who had to ask for it, and once you are asking for something you are already in a different position than you were.
The car. The bigger television. Which side of the bed. What we did at Christmas. The name we were giving our son — which I lost, in the February of 2025, at eight months pregnant, over about four conversations.
Otis is his grandfather’s name. Gloria’s father.
And I wanted Roland, after mine, and I did not fight for it, because by the February of 2025 I had been trained out of fighting for things by a process so gradual that I could not point to a day.
