My brother got married—and I wasn’t told. I found out the way strangers do: a photo on my phone, taken while I sat in a Kansas City coffee shop, a paper cup warming my hands.

In April, two years after the wedding I wasn’t invited to, I finished the table’s first refinishing—sanded out the worst of the rings, left a few because erasure is not the same as growth, rubbed in oil until my hands smelled like oranges and the future. I hosted dinner and no one asked for money and no one brought drama because I don’t invite drama to dinner, and Mina brought a spoon that Jonah carved and said, “A spoon is a boat for broth,” and we ate soup with bread that mapped the city in seeds, and Amber said, “Your life is boring as hell now,” and I said, “I know,” and she said, “Thank God.”

When nostalgia tries to leech sense out of me—when I see a boy in a letterman jacket fling a ball with an ease that still looks like promise and a girl who could have been me sit alone on a set of stairs running the math on what her love will cost—I say out loud the sentence that saved me: “Sacrifice doesn’t buy gratitude.” Then I add the sentence that built me: “Boundaries are the only receipt you need.”

If you’re reading this because you are, or were, the net—if you are tired in a way that naps cannot touch—here is permission you do not need from a stranger who learned it anyway: You can take the net down. You can fold it and use it as a blanket for your own cold legs. You can sleep. You can wake up. You can build a table with sharp edges and sturdy joints and invite only people who understand that a table is for holding plates, not the weight of a whole ungrateful world. And when the people you love ask you to prove that you love them by bleeding, you can point at your hands—clean, strong, splintered in the places honest work leaves marks—and say, kindly, “No.”

The world will keep spinning anyhow. The river will keep pretending to be steel in winter and forgiveness in spring. The pigeons will keep making terrible decisions on elegant statues. Somewhere a girl will learn that APR is not a friend and a boy will learn that apologies without commas change the shape of a day. Somewhere a woman will learn to write her name on a deed and on a life and mean it.

Somewhere a brother will learn to buy rice, one bag at a time.