The Missing Page

When you were small, someone handed you a manual for how life works. Not a real one. They just showed you, every day, how it's done.

How to argue. How to say sorry. What to do when you're sad. You didn't choose it. You just started reading. And years later, you notice the gaps.

No page on comfort. Half a page on listening. A whole chapter on staying quiet that never should have been in there. And you count them. Every single one.

You can recite the list by heart. You've told it to friends, to partners, to yourself at three in the morning. The manual doesn't get any thicker. And you don't get any lighter.

Then, one day, you hear yourself say a sentence you swore you'd never say. That doesn't make you them. It means you're reading from the same book.

So turn it over. Look at the cover. Look at how old it is. Someone was reading this long before you were born.

It was handed to them the same way, with the same pages missing. That doesn't make what hurt you okay. Understanding isn't excusing, and you don't owe anyone closeness. It only means the gap was never about you.

And you have a pen. You can write the page nobody wrote for you. It will be clumsy at first. Write it anyway. Then hand on a thicker book than the one you were given. Which page would you write first?