Pushed away: Ferns

It lives inside its own sorrow at close range, returning to the grievance regularly and finding real company in it, while other people's difficulties register faintly and briefly if at all. The sorrow was the family's medium before it was the person's, absorbed from the womb onward in a household where suffering was the shared language and the currency of attention. What it asks for is one full hour spent on somebody else's trouble, without bringing it back.

Nobody's had it quite like I've had it, and I can talk you through why.

It echoes Deirdre, whose name was sorrow before she had done anything to earn it, and whose story was foretold as lament and then lived as one. The form implies a task: to test whether the prophecy still requires performing.