I drove back from Hampton & Associates in a kind of dissociative clarity. Dallas traffic moved around me in its usual ugly flow—SUVs, brake lights, lane changes, hurried men in white shirts talking into Bluetooth headsets, women with expensive blowouts leaning into left turns like they had somewhere more important to be than everyone else on the road. The city looked exactly the same as it had that morning. Glass towers, old money neighborhoods, landscaped medians, private schools behind brick walls, restaurants where people spent what I once made in a week on one bottle of wine.
Nothing outside had changed.
And yet I felt as though I had been pushed out of one life and dropped into another one whose edges had always existed invisibly beside it.
By the time I got home, I was not crying.