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64 Moving Out Most things are best loved at a distance. Even your own God, forgiving, who presses his small diamond of grace into your skin. Remove him. Detach, and let him rise above you, a cadence of flight just below the yellow wheel of lamplight. And some hours are pure lapses of faith. Remember the absence of your sister: the Christmas feast back home, your mother proud before the table, tapered red candles and gumbo; the ex-husband, his brown-haired daughters perched on his lap. Beautiful. Detach and float above it all. You are able, knowing you cannot draw any of those hurt bodies towards you. Hope for each a love with ease, the kind you didn’t have. Your mother made you so afraid of loss; no one knows better than the women in their holiday sadness what the empty air outside, the great stillness settling among the pecan branches means. A death is being sung now within the circle of daughters. Detach and sing with them. ...

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