LENA

I had been easy to manage for a long time.

I had been easy to manage so successfully and for so long that I had stopped distinguishing between the managing and the living. I had thought they were the same thing. I had thought the careful breath and the exit calculations and the granola bar in the pocket and the bracing at the sound of a door were simply the way a person moved through a space. The way everyone moved through a space. I had not known, because I had not had the comparison, that there was a way of moving through a space that did not require...