You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place. But standing there alone on the landing, I thought of Grandma Halley and how she'd held me close against her lap as we watched the sky together. I'd always thought I couldn't remember, but suddenly in that moment, I closed my eyes and saw the comet, finally, brilliant and impossible, stretching above me across the sky.

But I'd long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren't guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a good-bye at all.

None of it meant anything, and all of it was important.

Like a word on a page that you’ve printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign. And you feel scared for a second, like you’ve lost something, even if you’re not sure what it is.

It's hard to be nice when the rest of the world is so mean.

But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren't what people wanted to hear.

It's not forever', she'd said, but to my mother, it might as well have been. She had make her choice, and this was it, where she felt safe, in a world she could, for the most part, control.