My mother-in-law overcooks the turkey every year and every year we all say it's perfect. I used to find this exhausting.
Now I watch the whole thing like a man who knows something the rest of the table doesn't. Six people crammed around a surface built for four. A candle burning oxygen it doesn't need to burn, just to make the light softer. My father-in-law asleep in the good chair before the plates are cleared, snoring, trusted enough to be unconscious in a room full of people. Steam coming off the potatoes. Somebody's kid under the table with the dog.
Here is a fact I can't shake. The air that keeps all of them breathing, the whole sky, is thinner than the shell of an egg if you measured it to scale. That's the entire margin. Below it, rock and fire. Above it, nothing that wants us. Everything I love has always been pressed into that one thin layer, and I never knew it until I was outside it looking back.
From up there you can't see the table. You can't see the house. You can't see the country the house is in; the borders they fight over down here simply are not drawn on the actual planet. You see a blue curve and a lot of black.
So when my mother-in-law sets down the dry turkey and looks around to check we're all still here, I say it's perfect. I'm not being polite. I have seen how much dark there is, and how little of the warm thing, and how easily the light goes out.
I pass my plate.
I let my father-in-law sleep.