I Am Old Enough to Miss People I Would Never Want Back.

Memory is a crooked real-estate agent. It turns on the warm lights, hides the water damage and invites me to walk through a life I moved out of for very good reasons.

The rooms look smaller now. The arguments have lost their volume. The difficult parts sit just outside the photograph while some ordinary afternoon—music playing, somebody laughing, nothing visibly broken—gets promoted to evidence that perhaps the whole thing was beautiful after all.