This is how my parents met: my father was standing on a table, a smear of blood across his cheek. My mother told me this story. He used to throw parties in his apartment, parties like the ones she threw, like the ones he used to come outside for, instead of turning the pages. Only his parties were even wilder, went even later. He was enormous when they met, she told me once, fully bursting at the seams. Yes, physically too, but that wasn’t what she’d meant. He’d just been hit with something, the first time she saw him, and his face was bleeding, and apparently you should have seen the other guy. He’d hopped down to greet her, the new girl, the friend of so-and-so, and she had kissed his cheek, her lips coming away bloody, and then he’d wanted more, so he’d buried his hands in her hair and kissed those bloody lips, and that had been that had been that. Plath herself would have wept.

“But that was before,” she said.

“So he’s better now,” I said.

“Your father didn’t become a Buddhist until after we were married,” she said. “If I had known what was going to happen, you probably wouldn’t even be here.” I stood to leave then, because I always hated to hear her talk this way about him, and she knew it. “I’m glad you are, though,” she said as I walked away. I didn’t say anything. I went up the stairs and shut my bedroom door.

My father never told me any stories about my mother. The only thing he ever said about her wasn’t even true, as it turned out. “Being married to your mother,” he said, “has been the greatest test of my spiritual practice. That’s why I can never leave her.”

Think of it as a system of vectors: my father and mother were connected. My father and me. My mother and me. But there was no triangle; somehow that shape never made sense for us. Instead, the two of them were like tectonic plates, drifting slowly away from each other. I didn’t try to choose a side until I was almost completely lost between them. I think I did get lost. I think when I finally jumped it was already too late, and there was nowhere to jump to, or from.

I know I should say that everything changed when my parents separated. That’s the narrative to which I should cleave. But it didn’t feel like that to me. My father had a new house, that was all, a bigger shrine room. It was my mother with whom I spent the most time, both before and after. Art projects and music, that’s what I remember, my mother dancing in her bare feet until my father came home. After the separation, the only difference was that I went to him.