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She taught me the art of not sleeping, passing my open bedroom door at midnight, book in one hand, and a steaming mug of tea.

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I used a flashlight and fiction to keep my eyes propped open against the natural desire to go dark. My father napped on the couch, the sound of his coughing rumbling through the air as familiar as birdsong, a man with limitless passion for a world of justice, and a deep well of resignation for himself. I can tell by my dark child eyes, wary, wounded, watchful, too tired for my age.

My mouth a thin line, a zipper behind which crouched men loaded up with threat. I carried a continent of the silence they beat into me with their dagger looks. It weighed a lot. I was an exhausted seven year old. The summer I was nine I could no longer walk up the hill at the summer camp my grandmother paid for me to go to just like my white Jewish cousins.

I got out of breath. I was just incredibly exhausted from being so afraid all the time and the effort it took to hide it because when the men said if I showed in word or deed what they were doing to me they would murder my family, I believed them. So I learned to play recorder and etch designs into copper and ride a horse in circles in a barn, but I stopped walking up hills.

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I know distraction. I know refusing to read the avalanche of emails, I know not wanting to do anything, but I only remember this: the summer I was twenty making up a biology incomplete by learning sea turtles, one afternoon in a hammock strung between the veranda posts of the old lighthouse I watched the blue flower of the sky keep opening and opening and my cluttered attic of a mind went empty, swept clean.

I think that may have been rest.