You, lucky you: your parents sure knew what they were doing when they made that house you’re sitting in, in that photo, in your big sister’s hand-me-down cable-knit sweater, puffing on a cigarette your mother would have scolded you gently for.

I longed to live in such houses of dark wood secrets, dim curtained delights, floating on a raft of eclectic odds and ends, so many you couldn’t know what they all were. You didn’t know and yet you knew the weight of that collection is what buoyed you up, what entrenched you in the deep crease of family history.

You were the new history then, the always little girl with borrowed potential, to hell with class today, your future a legacy waiting inside the warm glass air of ashtrays and vases, sconces and windowpanes, shadowy little buds in the kitchen window lashing the ceramic bowls on the sill. You were right, of course.

Houses of unselfconscious laughter, of make music, of overstuffed chairs and understuffed animals; the black green leaves of houseplants thick with dust and dead skin (years of parties, a bah mitzvah); books long since loved in their plastic bubbled jackets; oil paintings invisible and breathing on the walls.

I hated you.