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I thought about my parents' careful house, the stillness and the silence as the three of us crept along the dusted furniture and the vacuumed carpets - as though we did not so much occupy the space as move within it like stealthy lodgers. If you left a glass on the kitchen counter for more than five seconds my mother would whisk it away, wiping up the wet ring on the Formica with a furious sweep of her sponge. Covering out tracks, removing evidence of ourselves. It seemed to me we apologized for our very existence in the very way we lived, bowing and ducking as though to escape the notice of some vengeful god. It wasn't life that was lived there, but eternal penitence.

~Katherine Min, excerpt from Secondhand World