I wrote three versions.The first was professional. Formal inter-territory language, the kind I had learned in fourteen months of governance correspondence, the kind that communicated everything through structure and said nothing through words. I got four sentences in and stopped.My mother was not a territory. She did not require structure.The second version was honest in the way that honesty became when it had been held back for too long and arrived all at once. I wrote two paragraphs. I read them back. They were the two paragraphs of a person who was still seventeen and standing in the Marre territory making a choice and had never fully left that moment.I stopped.I sat at the desk in the small room off the east corridor that I had claimed as a working space separate from the study, separate from the governance machinery, separate from everything that required me to be the vessel or the equal authority or the person building the Map.I sat in it alone and held the pen.Nine years
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