Defiance

He is in his last teenage years then and I am thirty and we are by any ordinary standard in explosive hormonal synchronicity--it gives him energy, purpose, clarity of vision and fearlessness. And when I allowed myself to let go--even in the slightest--I got a glimpse of what this might have been, and was, as far as I could tell, for him. For a moment now and then, my solitude would lift and I could imagine what life might have been for me too--had absolutely everything been different.

pg. 145