When it comes to my family, it feels like I'm drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit agendas of long-held grudges, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my writer's fantasies proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of plots within plots, subtexts buried beneath more subtexts.
