This isn’t a new photograph. I took the image back in 2016, at a time when I felt like my heart might literally break into pieces.
I’ve never known how to best process the image,
and every time I revisit the picture, I make a different version.

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I sometimes sit in the car in my own driveway to read. There is something about this confinement that settles my mind and lets me relax into a good book. Inside the house, there always seems to be something else that needs doing.

The book in my hands these days—Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl.

Renkl, like all artists I think, is in awe of ordinary things. She tells this story, “Let Us Pause to Consider What a Happy Ending Actually Looks Like,” and in the last paragraph, there are these lines that make my heart tremble.

But the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin. —Margaret Renkl

I see now that I have my happy ending. It just looks different than I’d imagined.