These aren't the days to pretend you're only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We're more than this. — Maaza Mengiste

What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.

My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers.

She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones.