You remember the apple tree.

Nobody planted it for us. Nobody said here, this is yours. We just walked over one afternoon and there it was, branches hanging low and heavy in someone else's yard in a town where nobody built fences because the land just ran together like it couldn't be bothered to decide whose was whose. We picked one. We ate it standing in the sun. We didn't ask permission and we didn't feel bad about it and that was the whole lesson right there, if you'd been paying attention.

We were always like that. You remember.

We knocked on doors that weren't ours to knock on. We called people on the phone just to have someone to talk to. We walked into every classroom like we had something worth saying and raised our hand before we were sure, because being in it felt better than sitting back and waiting to be certain. Certain is for people who are afraid of being wrong. We were never afraid of being wrong. We were afraid of being invisible, which is a completely different thing and much more worth worrying about.

There was a man in a wheelchair down the road. He talked to us like we were a person worth talking to and we filed that away as proof that we were. There was a woman who opened her door when we knocked and offered us something to drink and we accepted without wondering whether we were imposing because it genuinely didn't occur to us that we might be. We told a woman once, flat and clear, I think we're family. She didn't agree. We went home, went back outside, found something else to do. Rejection was weather. It rained sometimes. We were not made of sugar.

We were loud. I won't pretend otherwise. We were loud and relentless and occasionally a genuine problem for the adults in the room. When there was a party we didn't linger in hallways. We walked in and pulled up a chair and inserted ourselves directly into whatever conversation seemed most interesting until someone noticed we were still there and sent us back to bed. We were not half in it. We were not glancing around for something better. We were right there, tracking the rhythm of every conversation, watching how people moved and laughed and disagreed and made up. We wanted to be seen and we were not subtle about it and we were not sorry. We understood that the room held things worth understanding and we were not willing to wait outside for a summary. We were interested in people. Genuinely, specifically, persistently interested. We asked real questions because we wanted real answers. We made people feel like the only person in the room because to us, in that moment, they were.

We also knew how to be alone. The woods behind the house, the worn dirt path, the creek at the bottom that belonged to nobody and therefore to us. We could spend hours down there just inside the afternoon, fully in it, watching the water move and the light change and the small things go about their business. No part of us was somewhere else. We made worlds. We wandered without destination and came back full. We were never waiting to be rescued or entertained or included. We were already doing something.

That is who we are. I need you to remember that. Not who we became after the weather came. Not the measured, careful, calculating version that learned to stand outside herself and watch how she was landing. That came later. That was learned. The original version, the one eating stolen apples in the sun, the one knocking on every door the neighborhood had to offer, the one raising her hand before she had the answer because she wanted to be in it all the way.

That is still us.

You got tired. I understand. The small cuts added up and the math changed and at some point the cost of being seen felt like more than you wanted to pay. So you built something to stand behind. You managed the presentation. You turned the volume down. You stopped asking real questions and started asking polite ones. You learned to make yourself convenient and I know why and I am not angry about it but I need you to hear me.

We were never convenient. Convenient was never the point.

The point was the apple. The point was the knock. The point was pulling up a chair to a conversation we weren't invited to because we were interested and alive and we wanted to be part of it. The point was saying I think we're family to someone who might say no, because we believed it was true and we were not in the habit of leaving true things unsaid.

You still know how to do all of it. It is in there underneath everything that came after. I have been keeping it warm.

Come back outside.

The apples are ready.