Everything assumes such an immense quality when you are a child. You are a seed amongst the trees - waiting, waiting, waiting - for the soil and the sun to open you up, to release you from the feeling of smallness. And in that smallness rests another seed, one of fear or something like it - a lack of agency and hopelessness.

My parents were trees.

Especially my father. Every morning as he would get ready to head into the confiserie, I would sit on the edge of the tub and watch him shave. To this day, I cannot feel cold without the sour, soapy smell of shaving cream filling my lungs, an association unbent by time and experience. He had this way of making everything he did seem so big, so important.

And my mother. She had this way of approaching everything with a preternatural speed. She had a reputation of being the best confidence in Northern France, but her inborn modesty kept her from accepting any compliment. She broke so easily - at least that was what my father would come to say - yet she stood the tallest despite the weather.

The first eight years of my life were relatively soundless. If I were to go back and throw a ball of yarn against my bedroom window, I probably would have been able to hear it. My parents used to rise together at the faintest hint of dawn and sip coffee, Mother with a novel and Father with Le Parisien, occasionally locking eyes as if to say, "Mon Dieu, Je time element." I would watch this from the thin crack of my bedroom door and inhale their light as if to retain it forever, not knowing that it was a fruitless task, for soon after my ninth birthday there was no light left, only rough blue dark that filled my lungs like...