Twenty Years After

Sophia's POV

Twenty years is a long time to carry something.

I had learned this not as an abstract truth but as a daily, lived, embodied fact — the way you learn things that are not available from books or teachers but only from the specific, cumulative experience of waking up each morning and carrying the same thing into another day. Not with the crushing, acute weight of the first year, when grief was the primary weather of every hour and the work of governance was the ...