Look.
Sometimes she can see herself behaving in ways she hates. “Unbecoming,” her father would say. “Ugly,” her southern grandma would say. Sometimes she can see that her singing to herself annoys people around her. Sometimes she swears she can feel her own face betraying itself; she’s been told it’s transparent. These are things she's come to accept. Life equals foolishness; hooray.

But there's worse; there's this: Times when it makes sense to forgive and be friends and she can’t do it. (When she was little, she never shoplifted.) There are situations that are not fair and she can’t help but maintain them as such, even knowing this. (She did, however, cheat at Pin the Tail on the Donkey at church once.) There are things she’d like to smooth over, but doing so would equal lying to herself. There are emotions that make no freaking sense but if you don’t listen to them, you’re a mess. Forgive/don't and who am I to. (There was Mexico. She’s not some innocent.) Forgiveness if you’re lying becomes something else. She begins to wonder how human fairness is, anyway. (“That must be a religious church,” says the Unitarian child to her mother once the shining white cross on the building under construction is revealed.) There is the irreparable. There is the too late. There are things she’s never said.