These are conditions I’ve never stated to her out loud. They live in the quality of how I engage, in the length of my texts and the warmth of my voice on the calls. She may or may not know they’re there. I suspect she does.
Aunt June asked me once if I thought we’d ever fully repair things. I said I thought the question of repair might not be the right frame. That repair implies returning something to a prior condition, and I wasn’t sure the prior condition was what I was aiming for.
“What are you aiming for?” she asked.
I thought about it. “Something honest,” I said. “Something that doesn’t require me to absorb things that shouldn’t be absorbed. Whatever that ends up looking like.”
“That sounds right,” she said.
I think it is. I’m not entirely sure yet what it looks like in practice. But I know what it requires, which is a start.
## The Fern
I looked up the species once. Based on the photograph — the close-up, zoomed-in, still inexplicable photograph he sent me — I narrowed it down to two possibilities, neither of which I can verify without actually seeing the plant, which is gone now along with the rest of what was in the yard of the house that has someone else’s welcome mat on the porch.
He never explained the photograph. He never replied to my reply. The next text was several days later and was about something else entirely.
I think about why someone takes a photograph of a fern and sends it to their daughter. I think about it without arriving at a conclusion, which is probably where thinking about it is supposed to land. It’s a photograph of something he was looking at and wanted to share. That’s the explanation and it’s also not an explanation at all.