That summer I was ravenous for the world—for stoop chats on hot nights, and endless seltzer at my kitchen table, next to the open window, listening to the anonymous soap operas of strangers on the sidewalks below. I’d never felt more seduced by the city, more grateful to it. I was determined to treat the divorce not as life paused, but as life happening. Every feeling was a fucking miracle. I wanted to believe that maternal love could be bolstered by everything else you longed for—friends, work, sex, the world—rather than measured by your willingness to leave these longings unanswered.

Wednesdays and Sundays started to feel less like proof I wasn’t fully a mother and more like freedom. Maybe it was okay to want what I wanted: long nights with friends, or solitude for work, the stillness of a Thursday morning spent drinking coffee at my kitchen table, chewing on pen caps and listening to strangers’ voices rising from the café tables below, where twenty-somethings drank cortados and read Nietzsche before their restaurant shifts. Someone said, “It didn’t end when colonialism ended.” Someone replied, “Who said colonialism ended?”