In 2002, a movie I never saw became a symbol of everything I wanted to escape. Twenty-three years later, I finally watched it—and found myself looking back at the man I had been.

A woman. No one I would ever know. An ordinary woman. An unseen woman rolling down crooked, clackety sidewalks near City Hall.

In this poem, memory returns in fragments—sweetness and silence, punishments and longing. A child’s mute resistance, a mother’s anxious gesture, a father’s belt, and the hush that follows loss: together they form a lyrical conversation with parents long gone, both loved and resented, never fully forgiven.