March 26, 2019:
It was difficult for me to understand her, because she shared so little.
On the one hand her inwardness protected me from the horror she'd lived. On the other it isolated me from her formative experiences, preventing genuine depth of contact.
So that when her Cinderella family fell from the sky it was both the realization of her life-long fantasy and an imaginary do-over which she seized with her entire attention. One in which, naturally, no-one existed but her, the little girl in the closet, freed and unencumbered.