Opening

Breathe.

Eyes closed,
rolling upward
toward a heaven
undisclosed
to anyone else.

Seeing
what is asked of me
from Mother,
from Abue,
from family,
from others
I cannot recall—

but they recall me.

To see
what I have been
so blind to.

To hear sounds,
smell,
taste,
feel
differently
than I had.

No. Let me correct this.

To feel the things
I had already felt
properly,
but was raised
to ignore.

To see with the eye
that was given
as don,
the one that helped
bring me back
to my senses.

To reclaim the entirety
of me
that seemed to be drowned
by the noise
that keeps being made—

mindless noise,
making us forget
to be mindful
of ourselves.

I see the lid opening
on the most exhausted eye,
the eye that looks
on and beyond me,
on and before me,
onto me.

And I am blessed.

I am present.
I am past.
I am future.

I am here.
I am not.

I am everything.
Everything is me.

Gueta.

I am complete.

Déjate Caer

(inspirado por Los Tres)

Camino yo por arriba
y mi cuerpo, thanatótico,
tomando mis pasos,
siguiendo mientras
su piel se cae
y sus esos
se derraman,

tocando
el espacio
que nos separa.

Sonámbulo,
pensando en nada,
pensando en todo,
pensando en ella.

Lo tan, lo tan
cerquita que estamos.

Lo único que nos separa
es un espacito
tan delgado
y callado
que sorprende
que entre ella y yo
quepan miles de líneas
de tiempo e historias
que ni yo ni ella
conocemos.

Y todo lo que hago
es querer saltar de aquí a allá
pa’ verla.

Qué puedo decir…

Es que me muero
por conocerla.

Al Que Me Hizo Daño

Para los que han sufrido el daño.
Y para los que algún día tendrán que entender el daño que hicieron.

—————————————————

Al que me hizo daño:

El público no sabe quién eres. Solamente tú.

Yo escribo las cosas para sacarlas de mi cuerpo. Para sacarlas de mí. En mis escritos, tú eres solamente una letra y una historia. Yo no puedo hacer absolutamente nada con esto, porque esto no es una venganza contra ti. Esto es contar una historia.

Tú me dijiste una vez que no me querías hacer daño, pero eso fue una mentira. Porque por años eso fue todo lo que hiciste: hacerme daño.

Me hiciste daño siendo mi amigo falsamente.

Me hiciste daño echando mentiras sobre tu primo y manipulando todo.

Me hiciste daño usando mi cuerpo.

Todo eso fue daño.

¿Y para qué? ¿Porque yo no te pude amar como tú querías? Porque yo sí te quise. Yo te amé como amigo. Yo siempre estuve ahí por ti, hasta el fin del mundo. Y tú te burlaste de ese amor. Te burlaste de ese cariño.

Tú sabías todo lo que me había pasado en la vida. Tú sabías todo lo que yo había sentido. Tú sabías mis cosas. Y aun así lo hiciste. Hiciste daño.

¿Y por qué?

Tú dijiste que yo no llegaba a tu nivel. Que yo no era para ti. Que yo ni te tocaba los tobillos. Eso último lo estoy diciendo yo, pero me entiendes. No era tu tipo.

Pero yo sé lo que soy. Yo sé lo que tengo. Sería una persona increíble para cualquier otra.

Uno puede perdonar. Uno puede intentar olvidar. Pero el cuerpo no olvida.

Y lo que me hiciste abrió todos los otros daños que yo ya había sufrido. Tú sabes lo que yo he sufrido. Tú sabes todos los daños que he vivido. Lo que tú me hiciste abrió todos esos pedazos otra vez.

Yo sé lo que es sentir daño. Yo recuerdo el daño. Y tú también sabes lo que es ser dañado.

Tú sabes lo que hiciste. Yo sé lo que sentí.

Y ahora, en este tiempo, yo tengo que recoger todos los pedazos de mi vida otra vez por todo el daño que hiciste.

Tú puedes vivir tu vida. Tú puedes seguir. Tú puedes hacer todo. Tú puedes oír tu música. Tú puedes viajar. Puedes tener cuantas parejas quieras. Puedes existir. Puedes comer. Puedes respirar y reírte de verdad. Puedes vivir tus días como quieras.

Yo ahora mismo no puedo hacer lo mismo.

Yo tengo que ir a terapia intensiva. Yo tengo que hacer tareas mentales para mejorar. Tengo que verme más frecuentemente con los doctores. Mis amigos y mis hermanos han tenido que estar más pendientes de mí, porque este daño me dejó en un lugar muy oscuro.

Tengo ataques de pánico y tengo pesadillas. Y aun así tengo que existir, funcionar, reír y ser una persona. Un ser. Tratar de funcionar como un ser humano normal, porque si no, no puedo vivir. No podemos pagar renta. No podemos comer. No podemos sobrevivir.

Y no entiendes. Nadie entiende lo difícil que es eso, aunque lo hayas vivido. Aunque hayas sufrido daño.

Yo tengo que llorar y pararme. Gritar y pararme. Pelear por vivir y pararme. Sentir que se me va el aire y recogerme. Para algún día estar completamente sana otra vez, aunque sea con una cicatriz más. Una cicatriz que tú me dejaste junto con todas las demás que ya tengo.

Yo puedo irme de esta casa. Yo puedo un día reírme de algo de veras. Enamorarme otra vez. Sentirme segura. Tener una vida tranquila. Yo puedo tener de todo algún día. Pero tú siempre vas a estar aquí, en el recuerdo que me dejaste.

Y eso es lo que quiero que entiendas.

Tú me hiciste daño.

Y yo te perdono.

Te perdono porque estoy cansada de estar con rabia. Estoy cansada de sentir tanto dolor y asco. Estoy cansada de vomitar, de no comer. Estoy cansada del miedo y de la angustia. Estoy cansada de estar así todos los días. Estoy cansada de esta rabia interna contra alguien que no merece mis energías.

Porque esa es la gran verdad.

Yo no merecí el daño.

Y tú no mereces odio.

Te perdono.

Te perdono, pero no te olvido.

No puedo olvidar algo que mi cuerpo todavía recuerda.

Tú me hiciste daño.

Y eso siempre quedará.

I Will Take It From Here

Content note: this piece references sexual harm, emotional manipulation, trauma memory, family privacy, and healing.

There are a few truths I know.

I love myself.

I love L.

And L has no idea about any of this.

Or at least, that is how it seems.

I asked him if he viewed my socials, and he got upset at the “accusation.” But the truth is, I never accused him. It never bothered me if he had seen my work. What panicked me after I realized everything, was the idea that maybe it was J reading my entries, then telling me L had been reading and seeing my work to mess with me.

So I privatized everything.

I took myself out as a creator for a couple of weeks.

Then I asked a question only L would know the answer to. Not because I wanted to trap him. Not because I wanted to accuse him. Because if he answered, I could know where the information was coming from, and I could leave him alone.

J would not have known how to respond.

But when L got upset, I realized something.

He might have absolutely no idea what has been happening for the past couple of years.

Maybe not even the past seven.

Maybe that is good. Maybe it makes his living situation easier. Maybe it is better for him not to know what kind of person his cousin has been to me.

But then there were the things he said.

The insinuations that I was mentally off. That I was lying. That the question itself meant there was something wrong with me.

And that felt familiar.

Whether someone says it calmly or screams it, using my mental well-being as a weapon still cuts the same way.

I knew he was defending himself. I knew he was hitting where it hurt. Whether he looked or not did not matter at that point.

So I took him at face value.

I expected J to lie more than I expected L to lie at this point, so maybe L truly did not know. Maybe he still does not know. And unless he asks, he will not find out from me. Because if he already believes I am lying, then I am not here to beg anyone to believe me.

What I wanted him to understand more than anything was that I had not accused him of anything. I wanted him to know that I cared about him. That I loved him. That I wanted to be with him, but not in the broken, tangled, wounded way all of this had become.

But I still spoke to him broken and tangled.

My knees still shook every time I spoke. I was still nervous. I still could not meet him where he was. I couldn’t tell if it was him, or if it was because I was standing in front of the door anymore.

I realized what I had been trying to say: that I wanted to support him, that I wanted to be there for him, and that I loved him — but not like this.

So, I did my best, in stoned words, to say what I had been trying to say in that doorway.

That I loved him.

That I wanted to be with him.

But not like this.

Not fucked up.

His response was, well, he did what he needed to do to get me away. He knew me well enough. He knew what to say.

And my mental floodgates started opening.

Because maybe that was the real question underneath the question.

I wanted to know if J had ever told the truth.

I wanted to know if anything he said had been real, or if it had all been another way to keep me confused.

I wanted to ask L because he was the only person who could answer.

And in a way, he did.

Not by telling me what J had or had not said.

But by showing me what happened when I brought things straight to him. I may have not asked outright, do you have feelings for me, but it was there. And his response, that was an answer too.

Maybe not the answer I was looking for.

But enough of one.

And then came another question:

“Why haven’t you blocked each other?”

Because when I do not want someone to speak to me, especially after they have disrespected or hurt me, I block them. Sometimes I tell them. Sometimes I do not. If someone tells me they have feelings for me and I do not feel the same, I tell them. I do not try to humiliate them.

But he has hurt me.

A lot.

And regardless of what the entire truth is, I know this: I was manipulated by J for years. I loved someone and felt safe enough to be near him, and I was treated like crap.

Then I was harmed by him.

And after that, everything folded in on itself.

Another truth is that I love L.

Romantically, yes.

But also in a way that feels ruptured by what happened with J.

For years, I thought L did not give a fuck about me.

And I lived.

I existed.

I moved through life.

I dated. I was with people. And sure, I cared about L as a person. I worried about him. I loved him as a person, but not in the way everything later became.

After the harm, I started looking back at years of confusion, distance, silence, manipulation, and unanswered questions. I started wondering what had been true and what had been twisted. I started wondering how much of what I believed had been handed to me by someone who was never really trying to be my friend.

Because with J, I understand now, it was not about friendship.

It was about sex.

It was about access.

I remember J asking me once, years ago, when I was freshly out of the hospital:

“Why him and not me?”

I never fully answered him.

Maybe I did not know how.

Maybe I did not understand yet what my spirit already knew.

But I remember the question.

And looking back now, I cannot pretend it meant nothing.

I cannot say exactly what lived underneath it. I cannot solve him. I do not want to.

But I know the question stayed.

And after everything that happened, it feels like one of the keys left behind in the room.

I understand parts of J.

Or at least, I thought I did.

He gave me pieces of his childhood. His history. His story. And I hold them with care because that is what I do when someone hands me their pain.

But after everything, I still ask myself what was real and what was not.

I do not know what was  the truth.

I do not know what was intimacy.

I do not know what was confession.

I do not know what was another way to gain access to me.

And that hurts in a way I am still learning how to name.

Because I cared.

Because I listened.

Because I made room for his pain.

And now I am left wondering how much of what I was holding was ever offered to me honestly.

What I know is that I kept trying to repair a relationship with the wrong person, while avoiding the person I was actually afraid to face.

After I was hospitalized, I had started getting better.

I was finding myself again.

Listening to myself.

Loving myself.

Learning how to hear my own wants and needs.

But instead of talking to L, I talked to J.

I tried to make peace in the wrong room.

And I ended up here.

That is not me blaming myself for what happened.

I know better than that now.

It is me seeing the pattern.

It is me seeing how badly I wanted clarity, how badly I wanted safety, how badly I wanted one person in that house to tell me the truth.

And L will never fully know how all of this affected me unless he asks.

He will never know what it did to have someone lie to me, manipulate me, violate me, and leave me questioning the shape of my own reality.

Maybe he cannot understand.

Maybe he does not need to.

But I know.

I know what happened.

I know what I felt.

I know what I survived in my own life.

And I know what L has said out loud.

I know what he has kept silent.

I know how he has looked at me.

I know how he has walked away.

I know the distance.

I know those things too.

And what I know now is that I love myself enough not to accept that anymore.

Because that kind of response comes from a wounded place.

And if we are going to come to each other at any point now, we have to come correct.

Not like this.

So I wanted to see if he did the thing.

The healthy thing.

The good thing.

He said he did not want me to contact him again, but for years, the door was always left a crack open. I wasn’t blocked. And maybe that should not have mattered, but it did.

Because it felt like a dare.

Like an invitation to come back into the same loop and be punished for entering it.

And I wanted him to close it.

I wanted to close it.

Because I understood I was not well.

He told me he had people. He had friends. He had support. He had his job. He has things going for him.

And I didn’t want to keep doing this.

We needed to be clean.

Because the way he was treating me was not something I could keep carrying. He was making me question myself. I was angry. I wanted to yell. I wanted to explain. I wanted to make myself smaller and smaller. Or run down there, but to what? To freeze and panic?

But I also wanted to walk away and say nothing. Say, “That’s it. I’m done with him.”

But I wasn’t.

Not him.

Because I do love him, and it wasn’t that I was giving up. It wasn’t L that I was done with.

I have always swallowed the thing. I have always left with the wound still in my mouth. I left before. I walked away before. I wasn’t walking away from him. That’s what it may have looked like from the other end. But this time…I was walking away from this toxicity.

I had tried to before.

I had blocked him when I felt hurt, then unblocked him when the guilt came in. When I started wondering if maybe it was my fault. If maybe I had overreacted. If maybe I had made something bigger than it was.

Then I convinced myself he must have blocked me too.

But he had not.

He had me open.

And maybe that should have meant nothing.

But to me, it meant the door was still there.

Not wide open.

Not inviting.

Not safe.

Just unlocked enough for the loop to begin again.

Because we had left the door open for each other.

That was part of the problem.

The door stayed cracked just enough for one of us to come back. Just enough for something unsaid to breathe. Just enough for hurt to find its way through again.

And every time the door stayed open, the same loop found us.

Confusion.

Longing.

Anger.

Silence.

A return.

Another wound.

So when he said he wanted me to leave him alone, but did not block me, I felt the pattern asking me to step back inside.

And I could not do it anymore.

If he would not close the door cleanly, I had to.

Not because I stopped caring.

Because I finally cared about myself enough to stop standing in the doorway.

And because I loved him enough to see that I could not keep asking him to meet me in a place where we were both getting hurt.

I could not stand in the doorway anymore. I literally could not speak to him anymore. And I knew this wasn’t the relationship I could hold with this person anymore.

So this time, I told him the truth that I saw from the door.

“Clearly you have more wounds left to give.”

And then I closed the door.

I blocked him.

It was not a gotcha moment.

It was me finally just saying something, albeit quietly, because I felt the words catch in my throat as I wrote them almost as if they were trying to reach him. attempting to name the thing that was with us in the room.

The wounds were still here.

I was still explaining.

He was still dragging me.

This was still unhealthy.

We were doing what we knew.

He knew how to push with thurt.

I knew where to push with feeling.

I pushed, and he pushed back harder.

And it needed to stop.

Because maybe to me, I was coming from love. Maybe I believed if I could explain it clearly enough, he would understand.

But I was making myself smaller and smaller.

And that is what always happens when I explain myself to someone who will never respond to the feeling, only to the pressure the feeling brings.

Because maybe the way I am can feel like pressure.

A person of feeling.

A person of sensitivity.

A person of reactivity.

Because that’s all my life and relationships have given me, it’s what I have learned, and have been unlearning; I have never genuinely felt safe. More recently that did happen. I did start to feel safe within myself and with others and then I lost it, when I lost my sense of self, when I was harmed by the very person I felt safe with. To pick up the pieces again is so fucking hard and this is an incredible understatement.

So I get it. I get how a person like me can become heavy in someone else’s hands.

Especially in the hands of someone who moves away when things get too close.

Maybe all of that has been too much pressure.

It does not make my love wrong.

It does not make my feelings wrong.

But it does mean I have to learn where to place them.

It was pressure.

It was weight.

And it was weight he did not deserve to carry.

His emotions were absolutely valid.

Just like mine are.

His reaction was not.

Just like mine was not.

And we cannot keep allowing this.

Especially now.

He has his own life, and I have no idea what he has going on. Just like he has no idea what is going on in my life. He tells me he is exhausted with work, and I believe him. He has his own shiit to deal with. He has his own things. He also has his own friends. His own people he could count on.

And I have mine, and they are ones I am looking toward right now.

I think I just needed to know some sort of truth.

And maybe, in a way, I got my answer.

However, I was not going to leave quietly.

Not for L.

I know my voice now, and he needed to hear it, too. I think, I owed him that much.

Stating the wound was probably the clearest thing I’ve said to him before closing the door.

And maybe that is the kindest thing I could have done for both of us.

Because the only way we can ever come into each other’s lives again is if we come correctly.

Not through a wound.

Not through the dare.

Not through silence, cruelty, guilt, or the same old cracked-open door.

Correctly.

Cleanly.

With truth.

With care.

With both of us whole enough not to turn each other into somewhere to bleed.

And maybe this is where I stop asking the reader to stay inside this haunted house with me.

At least for now.

This entire journey has been extremely taxing.

I have gotten to a point where I stopped panicking about who is reading this page. Tú sabes bien lo que hiciste. I don’t need to translate the pain for someone who understood the harm.

This body, this haunted house, is mine. I am not leaving it. I live here. This is my history. This is the mind that carried everything when there was nowhere else safe to put it.

But I can let the reader leave.

They can stop reading.

They can continue their lives.

I live in this body.

This is the house I am learning to make a home again.

I can open a window.

I can turn the lights back on.

Which is why I can say: this is what happened here, and now you, my darling readers, can go.

Because I have been working on short stories. Poetry. Artwork. Other rooms. Other worlds. Other ways of speaking. And with everything that has happened, I do not want this to become the only focus of my work.

But know this:

What I write comes from this haunted house.

My life is the reason I write.

When I was a child, I was given diaries and journals, but I never wrote in them.

I was too afraid.

My parents did not respect my privacy, so nothing felt safe enough to keep on paper. I was terrified they would look into whatever I wrote privately.

But the strange thing is, I didn’t even know what I was afraid of them finding.

I just knew there was something in me that needed to stay hidden.

Something unnamed.

Something I could not risk having taken, questioned, mocked, punished, or exposed before I even understood it myself.

So everything stayed in my head.

I wrote stories at school. I wrote for competitions. I told stories with friends. But the real things, the private things, the things that needed a place to live, stayed locked inside me.

Until one day, a friend asked a question.

And things started spilling out.

Like a nosebleed through fingers.

And that blood had been splattering about since my late teen years.

I started writing again when I went back to college in my late twenties. Then I was harmed again in my thirties, and I stopped going to college for a while. My writer’s block was heavy, and I struggled with putting words anywhere.

Later, in my late thirties, I began again, with difficulty, but I tried. I graduated. I made my website.

Then sometime between the end of the year and the beginning of January, everything folded in onto itself.

And now I am here.

I am here with the thing my mind finally remembered.

Because that is what I have learned about myself: when I keep things hidden, when I do not put them into words, they disappear. They go away into the rooms of my mind where I cannot reach them anymore. I forget. And for a long time, forgetting felt safer. Better, even.

But when I write, it stays alive.

It does not vanish.

It exists.

That is why what happened this year mattered so much. It was the first time my mind remembered. I begged myself not to forget, and it stuck. It stuck so hard I was unwell for months. I did not understand what was happening to me, but my mind remembered.

The body remembered.

The house remembered.

And when I finally wrote everything down, I was able to name it.

I was able to call it what it was.

I was able to see the whole thing.

The whole fucking thing.

I saw what happened to me. I saw the patterns. I saw my upbringing, my past, my family’s past, my mental health, my self-worth, and all the things that brought me to this point.

All of it has been scary.

Awful.

Painful.

But also, somehow, beautiful.

Because I grieved.

Because I talked to my friends, my family, my therapists.

Because I sat with my guides and my ancestors.

Because I began to trust myself again.

And that is something I have not been able to do properly in years.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I had written in those journals as a child.

If I had made the full attempt.

Would I have remembered then?

Would I be better off now?

More healed?

Would I still be dealing with the same things?

Would I be worse off?

Would I not be here at all?

Would my parents have known because they were nosy fucks?

Does it even matter?

It does not.

Because I know now.

And now I need to keep doing the work.

Not every ghost needs to be dragged into the light every day.

Not every room needs to stay open for viewing.

This is still horror.

It has always been horror.

Not because of monsters in the dark, but because of what happens when the truth has nowhere safe to go. Because of the things that rot in silence. Because of the body that remembers what the mind tried to bury. Because of the girl with the journal she could not use, growing into a woman who finally writes the thing down and realizes the house still has monsters in it.

But horror is not only the haunting.

Sometimes horror is the remembering.

Sometimes horror is the naming.

Sometimes horror is surviving long enough to become the person who opens the door and says:

Thank you for making your presence known.

I appreciate everyone who has been here with me during their stay. And if this experience has resonated with you in any way, know that I am with you, and there are ways to get help (links are below).

Resonance doesn't mean you have to stay here.

You can go now.

I will take it from here.

G O O D B Y E.

support/assistance/help if you ever need it ( they will be posted on the other content heavy blogs/ essays as well):

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673

 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988

 Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741
 

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 or text START to 88788

https://pflag.org/resource/support-hotlines/


Call or text 1-844-7NATIVE / 1-844-762-8483. StrongHearts offers 24/7 confidential and anonymous support

https://www.niwrc.org/

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help/

Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860 in the U.S. / 877-330-6366 in Canada

If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or your local emergency number.

You Seem Like You're Doing Pretty Okay

A picture can make survival look effortless.

It is not.

People might see my pictures, or anyone’s pictures, or a video of someone doing the latest trend on TikTok, and wonder what is really going on behind the scenes. They might look at someone who is struggling and think:

For someone who says they’re doing badly, they look pretty good.

But what you are not seeing is the person crying on the train.

You are not seeing the person screaming into the refrigerator. The person trying not to fall apart before work. The person having to choose, again and again, to stay. The person going through intense therapy with a therapist who specializes in generational trauma and abuse, while also seeing another therapist, and a psychiatrist, and doing every kind of healing work they can think of just to be okay enough to walk out the door.

You are not seeing the journaling. The shadow work. The breathwork. The sound work. The appointments. The check-ins. The moments where I have had to ask for help because I finally understand that asking for help is not weakness.

It is survival.

It is love.

It is me choosing myself.

I may look put together in a photo. I may be able to make a reel. I may be able to go outside, do my job, care for others, and appear functional.

But I am not pretending to function.

I am functioning.

And I am functioning because I have people in my life who love me. Because there are people who do know what I am going through. People who check in. People who listen. People who do not need me to perform wellness in order to be worthy of their care.

I am functioning because I am finally learning how to love myself too.

Because I am finally starting to know that I have worth.

Because I am doing the work, and the work is not easy.

For years — and I mean since I was a child, if you haven’t been reading up — I did not value myself enough to recognize the people I had in my corner. I let myself believe I had no one. I let myself believe that the wrong people were the only people.

More recently, I was manipulated into thinking that what I feared was true: that I was alone, that I was too much, that I did not matter, that the only person I had was the very person helping me disappear from everyone else.

So I pushed people away.

And yes, I had the wrong friends too. I had people around me who were not actually for me. But this season has taught me the difference. It has shown me who is here. Who checks in. Who stays. Who lets me be messy and still sees me as worthy of love.

It has shown me what I have.

It has shown me what I need.

It has shown me that I am not as alone as I once believed.

I used to mistake isolation for truth.

I used to believe the people hurting me were the only ones who would stay.

I know better now.

I am blessed.

I am grateful.

I have learned so much, and there is still so much left for me to do.

I still have intensive outpatient therapy ahead of me. I still have healing to walk through. I still have loops to close. There is still so much pain that does not show up in a picture.

You do not see me crying at night. You do not see me crying in the morning. You do not see the anxiety, the ache, the heartache, or the moments where I go into the darkest parts of myself and have to find my way back.

You do not see the ancestral pain.

The pain of my mother. The pain of my grandmother. The pain of my family. The pain they endured and survived. The pain I now understand was never only mine.

That knowledge hurts.

It hurts to know that what I have carried, they carried too. It hurts to know that my healing is not only for me. It is for them. It is for the parts of us that were never given language. It is for the women before me who had to swallow everything and keep moving.

So yes, the picture is one thing.

But I am not great.

I am not magically healed.

I am not doing amazing.

I am doing something.

I am getting better.

I am getting stronger.

Not because the pain disappeared.

Not because everything is fixed.

Not because healing has become easy.

I am getting better because I am finally letting myself be helped. I am getting better because I am doing the work. I am getting better because I am learning how to tell the truth without letting the truth destroy me.

I am getting stronger because I am not carrying this alone anymore.

I am getting stronger because I am showing up for myself too.

I am doing the work to get myself right. For me. For the people I love. For the people who love me. For the people who need me. For the versions of me that deserved better and are finally receiving it.

This is not about proving anything to anybody.

This is just the journey.

Because nobody really knows what another person is carrying. Nobody knows what it takes for someone to get up, get dressed, go to work, pay bills, see their friends, take care of their family, and keep existing when their body wants to collapse.

And no, I cannot just lay in bed forever and wail.

Honey, in this economy? In this year of our fall of Western Civilization 2026? Hah. Tuh.

Not with these bills and soaring inflation. Not with people and pets depending on me.

No, baby.

You have to do things.

You have to work. You have to function. You have to exist. So you find ways. You find tools. You find people. You find breath. You find the Creator. You find your ancestors. You find the tiniest thread and you pull yourself forward with it.

I am not going to abandon myself again.

I have lived longer than some wounded part of me ever thought I would. I have survived too much. I have carried too much pain to let misery be the thing that takes me.

So yes, I may look pretty good for someone who has been through so much.

That does not mean it has been easy.

It means I am doing the work.

No apologies.

Only gratitude.

To the people who stayed.

To the help I finally allowed in.

To the people who love me without needing me to perform wellness.

To my ancestors.

To my spirit guides.

And to myself, for not abandoning me.

Love Me Clean

I. Passersby

I love
But is love
Had
When
One
Gives
And the other
Refuses to receive
At all?

I love
It stays
And
Gets
In
The
Way
Of
Passersby.

II. Clean

I trace the shapes
and colors
on your arms,
down
onto your damp
palm,
laying my
warm hand
against it,
clasping fingers
gently around
your skin.

Tell me how your day was.
Tell me what scared you.
Tell me what moved you.
Tell me how you want i—
Wait. No—

Let our bodies say
what our words
could not
for so long.

Tell me, but don’t confuse me.
Tell me, but don’t lie to me.
Tell me, but don’t bend me.
Tell me, but don’t hurt me.
Tell me, and love me clean.

Iii. wallflowers

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower,
I remember reading
we accept the love
we think we deserve.

And I know I deserve
yours.

And you deserve
mine,
clean.

Even through lapses
and spaces
created in between,

my soul
entwines with yours.

It is where
it wishes to be.

I have an old ache,

and it is something
I never want
to give to you,

something that does not belong
to me
or to you.

So I’m learning how
not to mirror my wounds
upon you.

In loving myself,
I am learning
to see clearly.

We both deserve love
that is good,
clean.

And I want to give you love
in a way
that won’t harm you.

Where we can both disarm
ourselves,

leave every weapon
we have in our arsenal
tucked away
in this life,

so we can learn to use
our words,
our hands,
our arms,
our lips

in every graceful
and tender way
they were meant
to be used.

We waited long enough.

Good things, no?

They happen
in time.

So let them happen,
love.

Just Two More Minutes

Content warning: sexual violence, trauma response, stalking/harassment, intrusive violent thoughts, family trauma.

Yesterday, we had an encounter.

I was cleaning the front yard because we had finally gotten a new outdoor broom, and I had decided that some things were important again. Maintaining the space. Making things look good. Taking care of what I could.

It wasn’t about me this time.

It was about keeping things looking tidy.

So when I finally had the broom, I told myself that one day, when he wasn’t there, I would go outside and do a quick sweep. I would time it well enough. I would get it done, go back upstairs, return to my other duties, and continue with my day.

And that’s what I did.

For a while, things were fine. I had my music loud. I was focused. Nothing else was happening.

Then I saw a blue car driving up front, and my body started to panic.

I told myself, It’s okay. We’re safe. I’ve got you. You’re safe.

Then the blue car moved, and I couldn’t see it anymore.

I got confused.

I thought, Okay. It was just me.

My body loosened a little. I kept sweeping quickly because I realized I only had a few more minutes left on the clock before I had to get ready for my therapy session.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw someone walking down and into the gate.

It was him.

I got confused again because I could have sworn the blue car had driven away.

But now he was there.

My body started to panic again, but this time, the panic was angry.

Because he has done this before — shifted his presence just enough to make me question my own sense of safety.

This pattern where he parks somewhere else, or drives away, or makes it look like he is gone so I can feel safe, only to appear again. To watch me. To manipulate the space around me. To make me feel like I imagined it.

And this time, I fell for it.

I kept going because I thought he was just going to walk inside.

But he leaned toward me while I was cleaning and said, “Is there a problem, neighbor?”

He was close enough that even with my noise cancellation on, even with my music at full blast, I could still hear him.

I could feel him beside me.

He didn’t have to do that.

He didn’t have to get close to me.

But he did because he felt he could.

I grabbed the broom tightly.

The first thing I imagined was using it to hurt him.

The second thing I wanted to do was throw up.

I could smell him.

It is a strange thing, smell. I have always had a sensitive sense of smell, but not like this. Not this intensely. Everything has gotten so sharp. So immediate. So physical.

I smell him from a distance now, and it makes me nauseous.

I smell him everywhere.

I couldn’t speak because the first thing that wanted to come out of my mouth was:

My problem is you.

My problem is that you violated me.

My problem is that you keep finding ways to violate me.

Instead, I stood there, pretending I couldn’t hear him.

He kept going.

I wanted to leave.

I threw the bag in the trash and almost ran, but then I told myself:

Two more minutes.

The timer hasn’t gone off yet.

Finish your task and then go.

Don’t let him get the best of you.

You’re still safe.

You still have me.

So I kept going until I heard the timer.

Then I ran upstairs with everything.

I didn’t finish the task exactly how I wanted to.

But I did the work.

The time passed.

And then therapy started.

I had to explain to my therapist what happened. I told her that this is getting exhausting. That I can no longer keep putting myself through this over and over again.

Yes, it is getting easier to see him from a distance.

But having someone force space to happen that way, having someone approach you because they know they can, and then not being able to retaliate because you have to think about other people, because you have to think about consequences, because you have to think about survival — it is exhausting.

And I hated that.

I hated the consequences.

Because I wanted to scream.

I wanted to call him what he is.

I wanted to make him feel what he made me feel.

And I couldn’t.

I didn’t have a choice.

I had to stay still again.

And that was painful.

There are times when I wish I could turn back time to a point where I had healed faster, done things differently, known better, left sooner, chosen myself sooner.

But I can’t.

I am here now.

So this is what I do.

I work on it.

I heal.

I fight against all the bullshit.

I feel what I have to feel until it hurts less, until it no longer owns me.

So that the next time he tries, maybe I can tell him to back the fuck up and not speak to me.

Or maybe I will continue ignoring him until the day I leave.

Until the day my brother can leave.

Until the day I can finally turn around and call him what he is to his face without fear of what it will cost me.

Right now, I can’t afford to.

So I don’t.

Because there are other people involved.

Because there are other people I have to protect besides myself.

And that is the tricky part.

When you are younger, you don’t always have the tools to get out of things in time. You don’t know what you are inside of until it has already shaped you. Until it has already taught your body how to survive.

Healing is strange that way.

It gives relief, but it also gives memory.

It gives clarity, but it also gives pain.

And maybe that is why the conversation with my brother turned toward family, too.

Because once you start seeing one pattern clearly, others begin to show themselves.

Once you start asking, Who taught my body to call unsafe things safe? you cannot always stop at one person.

My brother and I agreed that it would be better if I saw my parents less right now. Not completely. Not forever. But less.

A lot of these realizations have hurt both of us. He can drown things out better than I can. I feel too much. He carries it differently.

So maybe this is a kind of semi-no-contact.

I can’t go fully no-contact with them. They are older now. Life is complicated. Love is complicated.

But I also cannot keep surrounding myself with people who make the same mistakes every day while I am trying to heal from the damage those mistakes caused.

I am not trying to fix everyone anymore.

I am trying to heal myself.

And I think, right now, it is important that I am not around my mother or my father too much.

That hurts.

But what else can I do?

I can see them once in a while.

I can love them.

But I cannot keep loving them in a way that keeps breaking me.

Especially not now.

Not while I am trying to understand what this has done to us.

What this has done to me.

I was made into a strong person.

But look at the kind of strength and resilience I have had to carry my entire life.

Yes, I am grateful for what kept me alive.

I am grateful for whatever in me refused to give up.

I would not be here without it.

But it still isn’t fair.

And that is what I am learning.

No person should have to learn strength this way.

support/assistance/help if you ever need it ( they will be posted on the other content heavy blogs/ essays as well):

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673

 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988

 Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741
 

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 or text START to 88788

https://pflag.org/resource/support-hotlines/


Call or text 1-844-7NATIVE / 1-844-762-8483. StrongHearts offers 24/7 confidential and anonymous support

https://www.niwrc.org/

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help/

Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860 in the U.S. / 877-330-6366 in Canada

If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or your local emergency number.

Like Eating Glass: The Thing Beneath "I'm Fine"

Lately, therapy has been heavy.

Shadow work. Journaling. Reflection. The kind of work that does not only ask, What happened to you? but also, What did you do while you were still trying to survive what happened to you?

That second question is harder.

It is one thing to look at the harm that shaped me. It is another to look at the harm I caused while living inside it.

For a long time, I did not understand how I lost certain friendships. I understood the pain of losing them, but not always the mechanics. Not the moment where something I thought was small, honest, or already discussed became something that hurt someone else.

Recently, I was talking to my brother about a friendship I lost years ago. A friendship that still hurts because I loved this person very much.

I still do.

She had a laugh that made your laugh burst out with it. We held silliness in tandem, without embarrassment. There was a freedom in being ridiculous with her, the kind of friendship where joy did not need to be translated or explained.

I loved her world too. I could talk to her parents. I could be silly and dumb with her twin brother. There was ease there. A whole family rhythm I was allowed to step into for a while. It was fun. It was safe. It was the kind of belonging I did not know how to hold carefully enough at the time.

I told my brother I never fully understood what I had done wrong. In my mind, I had been honest. There were people she had liked, or had history with, and I thought we had talked about it. I thought she had moved on. I thought I had checked in.

In one situation, I didn’t even really like the person at first. I liked someone else. I was even trying to talk her up to him. But he pursued me, not her. Eventually, I ended up liking him, and somehow, in the mess of all of it, I lost her.

For years, my brain stayed stuck there.

But I asked her.

But she said she was fine.

But I was honest.

But I didn’t mean to hurt her.

That was always the part I returned to: intention.

I didn’t intend to harm her, so I struggled to understand the impact.

Then I told my brother something I had always believed about myself. I said that when I was younger, if a guy liked one of my friends instead of me, I would tell my friend to go for it. I didn’t care. If he didn’t like me, why would I fight for him? Why would I be bothered?

My brother stopped me.

“Did you hear yourself?”

I did.

I heard it as soon as he said it.

It didn’t matter to me because I didn’t matter to me.

That was the thing I had never understood.

The “girl code,” the friendship rule, whatever name we give it, did not register the same way for me because I had never applied that kind of protection to myself. I didn’t know how to make myself important in a situation. I didn’t know how to say, This hurts me. This embarrasses me. This makes me feel replaced. This makes me feel small.

So when other people had those feelings, I did not always recognize them clearly.

Not because I didn’t care.

I cared deeply.

But I had been trained to override myself so completely that I did not always know when someone else was asking me, silently, not to override them too.

My friend valued herself enough to know when something hurt her.

I didn’t.

Because I didn’t, I mistook her silence for permission. I took her words at face value even when I could feel something underneath them. I knew something was off. I could feel that she wasn’t fully okay.

But I did not trust what I felt.

I had spent most of my life being taught not to trust what I felt.

So I accepted the answer that was easiest to understand.

“I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t fine.

And I should have asked more.

I should have said, “Are you actually okay with this, or are you saying that because it feels easier?”

I should have listened to the discomfort in the room, to the part of me that knew there was something unsaid between us. I should have cared enough about both of us to slow down.

That is where the grief lives now.

Not in the guy.

Never in the guy.

It was never worth losing her.

Even after I lost her as a friend, I still talked about her with love. I still told him what an amazing person she was. I still carried the friendship in my chest as something precious, even after I had damaged it. My brain could not register that I had lost someone who mattered more to me than anything I gained.

But I did.

I lost her.

And I hurt her.

There is a specific kind of pain in realizing that your lack of self-worth did not only hurt you. It made you careless in places where you thought you were being generous. It made you passive where you should have been protective. It made you accept crumbs and call it normal, then fail to understand why someone else would not accept the same.

I have spent so much of my life not thinking I was enough. Not thinking I mattered. Not understanding my own mind, my own needs, my own intuition. I have pushed people away with that. I have run from people with that. I have hurt people with that.

And I am sorry.

I am sorry for not listening to what she could not fully say.

I am sorry for not listening to myself when I felt the truth sitting beneath the conversation.

I am sorry that I treated her answer like a contract instead of treating her discomfort like something worthy of care.

I know now that communication is not only about what someone says. It is also about what trembles underneath it.

It is about asking again, gently.

It is about making room for the truth to be complicated.

It is about knowing that sometimes people say they are okay because they do not want to seem jealous, hurt, needy, or small.

And sometimes people believe them because believing them is easier than risking the harder conversation.

I wish I had risked the harder conversation.

There are moments when I wish I could still be in her life. To laugh with her. To cry with her. To hold her. To see who she became.

Years have passed. Whole lives have happened in the space between who we were and who we are now. There have been joys I did not get to witness and griefs I did not get to help carry. That is part of the ache too — knowing that when life asked for love, I was no longer close enough to offer mine.

But I also know that right now, I am still learning how to show up with care. I am still becoming someone who can love without reaching from the wound first.

So I will love her from here.

I hope she is well. I hope she is loved. I hope she is cared for. I believe she is. She has people who love her. She has family. She has a friend I trust with her heart.

And I hope, somehow, she knows that I understand more now than I did then.

It was not worth it.

None of it was worth the pain.

But I know better now.

I am learning to listen.

To myself.

To the silence.

To the thing beneath the words.

And wherever she is, I hope she knows this:

I am sorry.

I love you.

I hope you are well.

Reverie.

Eyes closed.

You have consent

to my body,

my thoughts,

and there is where

I lay comfortably

in the ephemeral

energy of your arms.

We can’t be here long.

I hold on

as if this were a dream,

malleable

but limited.

So I wrap myself around

you,

look inside your eyes,

and try to find a way

to never lose this.

But alas, I know

in time it will dissipate.

So let’s make the most

of tenderness.

I embrace you.

Our lips turn kindred,

twisting and bending

into a language

neither of us translates.

Our arms entwine,

under and over one another,

as legs wrap,

pulling each other

into a deep sigh,

a deep rhythm

we remember

from a time

we seem to forget.

As my body rises,

your body holds.

With hands I know —

hands that say,

gentle,

that say,

promise I won’t let go.

Strong.

The stretch of vines

and leaves begins to wrap

around our naked bodies,

crawling with small buds

starting to bloom.

You pull me

closer to you,

whispering something small

beneath me.

I move you above me,

our bodies circling

toward something

neither of us names.

We hold each other closer

as the room greens,

as each body remembers

In its own way

—then together—-

how to bloom.

Everything in us

becomes lush,

flourishes,

is gold.

A rose blooms

on your back

where I lovingly dug into you.

Eyes open.

Mujer Contra Mujer

Content Warning: This essay discusses sexual assault, childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, victim-blaming, and family trauma. Some sections may be emotionally difficult to read. Please take care of yourself while reading.

Author’s Note: This essay reflects on inherited blame, maternal wounds, and the impossible work of loving someone without carrying what belongs to them.

Cuando le dije a mi madre
(when I told my mother)

pensé
(I thought)

que me iba a abrazar
(that she would hold me)

esta vez
(this time)

Pero volteó la cara

e hizo un tsk con los dientes,

tan decepcionada de mí.

Y en pocas palabras me dijo

que era mi culpa otra vez…

Like so many things had been my fault throughout my life.

My dad cheating on her. The abuse I survived as a child. The priest who crossed a line he never should have crossed. All of it. Somehow, all of it had been me.

Except this time, I stood up.

This time, I realized it was not me. I was looking directly at what was to blame.

Or maybe not what.

Maybe where.

For a long time, I blamed my dad. Not entirely, not simply, because even that is not clean. My dad and I have been sitting outside for our balcony smoke sessions for a couple of years now, and lately he has started looking back at his life: his childhood, his family, the way he treated us, the way he raised us, the way he was raised, and how all of that may have shaped the whole dynamic.

A few days ago, he called it una mancha on the family.

A stain.

He said it almost like a curse, like something placed on us. But the truth is, what my dad was naming was a long line of trauma. A long line of hurt people who kept hurting other people. And inside some of those hurt people, there were good people trying to make their way out of the loop, not knowing how, so they continued it instead.

It is painful. It is sad. You can see them trying not to repeat the same malice through their children, but they fail. Then the same wish repeats and repeats, hoping someone will somehow get it right in the next round.

But that is not how it works.

You are not supposed to get it right in the next round. You are supposed to get it right with you.

And that was the message my mother, my father, my grandparents, and their parents never quite understood. That is why all of this is so sloppy. The good is never quite where it is supposed to be, and the malice spills through to us.

As I tried telling my mother that my father was part of the reason I had ended up in the situations I had been in, she looked at me and shook her head no.

I remember that head shake. Always in my father’s defense. It was that same defense that always put him before her children. She never quite understood how dangerous that was. Neither did I, not fully. But as I got older, and now, in what feels like my final, most painful awakening lesson, I saw that the problem was not only him.

That was the part I had not understood until then.

My father may have taught me fear, but my mother taught me how to explain it away. He was the violence. She was the permission. Not because she wanted to hurt me. Not because she did not love me. But because she had been trained to survive by protecting the man who hurt her.

And somehow, that became my inheritance.

As she sat there telling me, “I told you to defend yourself,” and “I never would have let that happen to me,” she defended my father again.

She defended the same man whose violence had shaped our home. The same man whose anger taught us how to shrink, how to listen for danger, how to make ourselves smaller before the room could break open. The same man who hurt her and still somehow remained the person we were expected to love, respect, and protect.

I had to love this man. I had to respect this man. I had to carry the weight of what he did to her, too.

Even as a child, I became part of their marriage. I became the witness. The messenger. The one who knew too much. The one who said something and was blamed for what saying something revealed.

My fault.

I still do not know how to ride a bike. And now, with an inner-ear problem, it is a little harder.

Years later, when I would tell her what happened to me as a child, she would say, “Well, who told you to be alone with him? I told you never to be alone with him.” As if telling me never to play with boys would have stopped me from playing with people my age. As if a child should have known how to protect herself from people she trusted.

You can tell a little girl not to go upstairs with a boy. You can warn her. You can make rules. You can call that protection.

But when you teach that same little girl to accept abuse from her father, you are teaching her something louder than the warning.

You are teaching her to stay.

You are teaching her to doubt herself.

You are teaching her that love and fear can live in the same room, and that if something happens to her inside that room, she should ask herself what she did wrong before she asks who hurt her.

Even after growing up, even after fixing and reframing that, a part of me will still ask the question: Am I the reason? Is it me? And I will always be apologizing for shit men do. Always.

And they will begin to allow it. They have. I have allowed things to happen that, in most situations, I would have stopped. Because I have been afraid to do something. Because I am afraid of what will happen to me. Because I have always been afraid.

I have seen what happens to the door. I have heard what happened to my brothers. I have seen what happens to me. And as rebellious, as loud, as violent as I can be, I am still that little girl. Scared. Frozen. Unmoving. Afraid of what will happen if I scream.

I raised my voice and said, “I’m starting to see maybe you’re part of the reason too. You’re always defending his actions when you should be on the side of your children.”

And then she said what she always says when talking about us:

“I let you live your lives. What you do is your doing.”

I used to hear that as distance. Now I hear it as defense.

It is the kind of sentence that tries to take responsibility off the speaker and place it gently, almost politely, onto the child. As if freedom and abandonment cannot sometimes wear the same face. As if letting us “live our lives” meant we had been protected inside them.

Anyone who knew us growing up would have called my mother overprotective. But she was not exactly protective. She was strict. Paranoid. Performative in the way fear can become performative when it does not know how to become care.

We were not free. We were caged indoors and told it was love.

The worst part is knowing she did want to be there in some form. She did try. But she was never shown how to be emotionally giving or nurturing. She had been taught to mother entirely too young.

She never got to be a kid. She was a mother, a servant, a cook, a seamstress. She was her mother at the ripe age of three or four. A child does not know how to be a mother. A child barely knows how to be a child. Children learn how to be by being, and she never got to.

She molded herself by others and never fully experienced self-expression or freedom. So when she finally came into her own motherhood, she “let us live our lives,” but we did not really go to parks. We rarely went to museums with the family unless it was through school. We had a curfew that was basically: get out of school and come straight home. Not one sleepover. It was weird.

You would swear we were hiding something. And yeah, we were. We were hiding an abusive family. Turns out my childhood friend A was right.

But none of us were aware of it. Not even my mother. To us, this was normal. This was everyday life. This was how you were supposed to be raised, right?

Then, when we were in Colombia, the rules changed. The cage loosened. Family became safety because family was supposed to be safety.

But things happened there.

And when they did, the blame still found me.

Not the adults who may or may not have been watching. Not the people who caused harm. Not the family history that made harm so easy to hide.

Me.

A six-year-old girl.

“No, mami. That does not work,” I said. “Not for this.”

Then she started to say, “So I’m a terrible mother. I can’t do anything right.”

I began to feel the rage come up inside me, but it was not just my rage. I felt her sister’s rage. My great-aunt’s rage. And inside all of it, I could feel my abuelita, her mother. A different emotion altogether. A feeling of having failed somewhere. Missed something. Where did they go wrong for her to treat me this way? I did not have the answers because I was too busy about to yell at my mother.

“Not now, mami.”

I got up and started walking away. My mother started hitting herself on the chest and said, “Well then, just stone me for being a terrible mother!”

I swear you could almost hear her sister’s spirit fill the room, because the ENOUGH was that loud. It vibrated in my body, in everything at that moment.

“Do NOT make this about you when your daughter just told you she was raped!” I said, as I walked out of the room and then out of the apartment with my brother, breathing heavily, gasping, reaching for air.

The disrespect I felt that day is something my mother may never understand.

She may think it was only me she hurt, but in that room, I did not feel alone. I felt the women before us pressing against the walls. Her mother. Her sister. My great-aunt. Elders from our pasts I had never known, all of them watching this same wound repeat itself in another body.

I wondered what they would have said to her.

I wondered if they had ever been blamed for what was done to them.

I wondered where the first woman dropped the ball, and how many daughters had been forced to bend down and pick it up.

Later that evening, my brother volunteered as tribute and tried to mediate a conversation between my mother and me.

He wanted to see if anything could be repaired.

But I do not think repair was possible that night. Not because there was nothing worth saving, but because everything had finally cracked open. There was no putting it back into the shape it had been before.

What had been revealed could not be unrevealed:

I was carrying blame that did not belong to me.

And my mother was carrying blame that did not belong to her, either.

The difference was that I was trying to put mine down.

“You have to realize, mami, what you say has an effect on people,” my brother began.

Almost immediately, before he could finish his next sentence, my mother said, “You are all in charge of your own lives and responsible for your own actions. I’ve done my best. Now I’m treated as a bad mother for saying things.”

We both looked at her and immediately said, “No,” and, “No one said that.”

Then my brother asked the bigger question: “Who said it’s your fault?”

My mother replied, “It has always been my fault. Every time I do something, whose responsibility is it? Mine. Whose fault is it? Mine. When something was done wrong, who would my mother blame? Me. And I would have to figure out a way to fix it. I wasn’t treated like the boys. I wasn’t given chances like everyone else. I always had to do what my mother said, what my father wanted, no matter if it was wrong or right. And they raised me right, and I was grateful for it.”

That was where abuelita dropped the ball. That was the feeling that was not quite the same as the others in the room.

My mother had been living under someone else’s thumb her whole life. She never lived. She wanted to draw, to paint, to design clothing. She never got to. She was so limited. Her creativity was stifled by parents, doctors, priests, nuns, and people who constantly told her she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, she shouldn’t. And for all of those reasons, somehow, it was her fault. She grew to resent herself and the people around her, and to believe they were right. That she was right.

I hugged her.

I hugged her tightly.

I hugged her the way she did not hug me that day.

I hugged her the way my abuelita may have wished she had been hugged. The way my bisabuela may have needed to be held. The way all the women before us deserved to be held before somebody taught them that suffering was duty.

I wanted to tell them I loved them. I wanted to tell them I was sorry anyone had made them believe these were truths they had to live by.

None of them deserved it.

None of them deserved to be robbed of youth, innocence, softness, freedom, or the chance to let their dreams flourish.

But I cannot heal them.

I know that now.

As I released my mother, she looked at me and said, “I’m not going to change, you know.”

I sighed and said, “That’s not the point,” and sat down as we continued talking.

A hug does not magically fix generational trauma and roll us to credits. If it were that easy, man, we could fix everyone real quick. No. It was never about that.

I told my mother it was about what she had just said. “I always thought the reason I had been in so many toxic dynamics was because of my dad’s influence. It wasn’t until your nod in defense of him that I realized it was also your staying with him, how you allowed him to be in our lives, how you allowed him to treat us, and how you allowed abusive men around us, that may have influenced how I allow and cope with abusive people in mine.”

I told her, “I think you did it because you didn’t want Dad to be upset with you. You were afraid of what he’d think, and that fear sometimes mattered more than us.”

My brother said nothing. My mother was in denial. And in myself, I felt that maybe this was what my abuelita thought too. Maybe that is what a patriarchal society does at times. It teaches a woman to hold up her husband before her child. To put her man before her child.

And to throw that at such a young little girl, to beat that into such a young little girl, so impressionable and now so unchangeable—I felt terrible.

I understood the hardest loops I had to break out of because I saw a woman who just could not seem to get out of them herself.

By the end of the week, I was walking my mother to the door after taking her to the nail salon. It had been an awkward outing, filled with one-word sentences and sarcastic remarks back and forth. But by the end of it, she had said something in the salon about us to the manicurist, who just so happens to know all our family—small world.

When my mother said, “I just let them live their life,” the manicurist felt, much like me, that it did not hit the way it was supposed to and laughed at it the way you would laugh at a French dark comedy.

“Oh, Ms. Gonzalez,” she said. “You sure do have a way with sayings.”

As I walked with my mother, something got conjured up in me. Not anger. Not sadness. Just acceptance.

“Mami, I know you’re not going to change,” I told her. “I don’t expect you to. And honestly, at this point in your life, I don’t want you to change for me. I want you to live for yourself.”

I wanted her to write the way she wanted to write. Draw the way she wanted to draw. Sing. Dance. Live that vida loca she always says she is living, but truly live it.

“I don’t expect you to change,” I told her. “I expect you to live. And I expect you to accept that you made mistakes as a parent. That is the part you are having such a hard time doing.”

Saying she let us live our lives was her way of putting down a weight she was still carrying. But there were things she needed to carry honestly. Not everything was her fault. Some things were her responsibility.

“Staying with my dad was the worst mistake you ever made,” I said. “And we were worse off for it. You know that. Accept it. I love you.”

I kissed her on the forehead and walked away.

support/assistance/help if you ever need it ( they will be posted on the other content heavy blogs/ essays as well):

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673

 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988

 Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741
 

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 or text START to 88788

https://pflag.org/resource/support-hotlines/


Call or text 1-844-7NATIVE / 1-844-762-8483. StrongHearts offers 24/7 confidential and anonymous support

https://www.niwrc.org/

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help/

Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860 in the U.S. / 877-330-6366 in Canada

If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or your local emergency number.

Not Quite Out of The Thicket.

Trigger warning/content note: sexual assault, manipulation, trauma, suicidal ideation, and healing.

Author’s note: This essay comes from a long process of piecing together what my body remembered before I could actually accept and name it. I did not do that alone. I have done it with therapy, family, chosen family, close friends, and time.

I am still in the process of healing. The reason I am sharing this is for the little girl in me who was never able to say anything, and for the thirty-year-old woman who was not able to report it in time. And if this resonates with you, then maybe it’s for you as well.

I know what I can and cannot do with this legally.

But here, at least, I can say it in the present.

Here, at least, I will not be silenced.

L took away the broom, and suddenly it seemed like I could no longer keep anything clean.

Not the floor.

Not the house.

Not the story I had been telling myself.

Everything got so dirty. All my intentions, all the things I had been setting, started falling in on themselves. All the good intentions I had for this place we all lived in. I had been trying to make the house feel better. Safer. More peaceful. More alive. I wanted the energy to change. I wanted everyone to get along. I wanted what had been broken to become something gentler.

“So I’ll get another broom,” I told myself.

But every broom I looked at was wrong.

It had to be that broom.

I didn’t understand why. Not then. I just knew that none of the others fit. None of them had the same bristles. None of them belonged to the house in the same way. None of them held the same intention.

But the truth is, the broom was never the point.

The broom only showed me what I had been trying not to know.

A few months ago, I decided to face the man I had been afraid to name clearly. I thought of it as part of my healing. Some kind of exposure therapy. A way to be respectful. A way to be neighborly. A way to stop letting fear rule the house.

Not because he deserved my softness.

Because I wanted peace.

Because I knew the harm he caused did not come from me. It came from whatever sickness, wound, entitlement, and rot lived in him. I didn’t want or need an apology. I wanted him to sit with himself and learn from himself, the way I was trying to sit with myself and learn from me.

I thought it was going well.

Everything seemed to be coming together.

I had been manifesting good things. I had shaved all my hair off to start fresh. I had told myself I didn’t want any part of him that had touched me. I scrubbed my skin raw in the shower. I got new tattoos. I bought wigs. I dyed my hair. I made cleaning schedules. I started taking care of myself, then the house, then the outside of the house.

I started bringing the healing outward.

I asked if I could plant flowers in the front yard. With permission from the landlord, my brother and I bought beautiful plants, and I began planting them during the weekend. I wanted the house to flourish. I wanted everyone in it to feel something good. Even if I eventually left, I wanted to leave the place better than I found it.

That was the version of me still trying to turn pain into usefulness.

That was the version of me still believing I could cleanse a whole house while lying to myself inside it.

When I saw his car pass, my mind started racing. Should I rush? Should I leave? Should I finish the work the way I normally would — the way I was taught: with good intention, with time, and by letting it flow?

So I stayed.

Eventually, he came out and greeted me.

He had the gall to hug me.

“You know we have our tiffs and all,” he said.

My face twisted.

“Tiffs? Okay.”

I laughed it off because sometimes laughter is the last little bridge between what your body knows and what your mouth is not ready to say.

I invited him to garden with me. I mentioned that I had invited L too, but he had not responded. I said it casually, but I understand now that I have always known how to mention a man when I feel unsafe. Since I was a child, saying a man’s name felt like protection. Like proof that someone else existed near me. Like maybe proximity could make me safer.

But with this man, proximity never protected me.

It only confused me.

He made small comments. Dismissive comments. Comments that sounded casual unless you knew where to look. I know where to look now. I know the difference between a joke and a blade passed gently under the table.

Something that day told me: face him.

Something told me: break the mold.

Not because I should have been alone with him. Not because it was safe. But because some part of me was still trying to understand him. Some part of me wanted everyone here to get along. And that hope did not come from nowhere.

He had mentioned camping.

He had talked about going upstate, about getting away for a weekend, about all of us somehow being in the same place without the sickness underneath it. I could see it like the final frame of a movie: L, my brothers, me, the families, everyone healed, everyone camping, everyone laughing, everyone turning the house into a home.

That was the fantasy he helped place in the room.

The healed version.

The lie I wanted to believe because the truth was too ugly to hold yet.

Before we went to the park, he told me to come inside the apartment. I had not been there in months. I had not even gone in when I came down to thank L for something small that had not felt small to me at all.

I came to thank L for helping me get to work on time, but it turned into thanking him for something much bigger: for helping pull me back to myself. He came to my apartment once when I had been lost for a minute, just chilled for a bit, talking to my brother and me, and that simple act brought me back in a way he probably does not understand. He came in. He gave a damn in his own little way.

And because I had love in me, because I had hope in me, because I had confused endurance with healing more than once in my life, I thought: if I can step into this space and not be sick, maybe I can reclaim something. Maybe I can watch a movie here one day. Maybe I can eat dinner. Maybe I can sit near someone I love without the past choking me.

So I walked in.

I endured.

I felt sick.

I felt scared.

And I held the pressure.

I watched him roll weed, then went upstairs to get ready. I told my brother who I was going out with, just in case, because some part of me knew I was preparing for a battle I was not ready for.

I thought I was walking into clarity.

And I was.

Just not the kind I expected.

We went to the park. He said he liked driving there because no one could see him walking due to workers’ comp. He said he wanted to be somewhere more secluded. He did not tell me to bring a blanket. He brought one seat.

I saw the red flags.

I stayed anyway.

I had my keys. I had my phone. I knew the park well. And that day, I told myself I was not there to talk as much as I was there to listen.

He lit a strain called “Speedy Gonzalez,” and I laughed because of course. Almost kismet. He started talking while watching the volleyball players. He talked about the game, about his life, about how this was his “last summer” because he was leaving in four months.

There it was.

He was leaving.

He was always leaving.

When we first slept together, he said he was leaving. Every time after that, that was the line. He was always going back to Puerto Rico. He was always almost gone. He was always temporary when it was convenient and present when he wanted access.

I clocked the time.

He had told my brother and me in December. Maybe next year. He wasn’t sure. Now, suddenly, it was definitely September.

Something in me was listening differently.

Something in me was finally taking notes.

At one point, I said something I thought was true, but now understand as part of the story I had built to survive him.

“You know I love you, right?”

He looked at me, shaken.

But even that sentence needs context. I had told him before, in Spanish, “Te quiero, como amigo. Te quiero mucho.” I had always meant it that way. As love. As friendship. As love poured into someone I believed was my close friend.

So when I said “te amo,” part of me knew it would throw him off. It was meant to. He was always berating me, saying, “Estás enamorada de mí,” and I knew the phrase would hit his ego somewhere, but also jolt him. Maybe, I thought, it would keep him at bay. But I still meant it from the same place. I meant: I care about you. I have loved you as a friend. You have mattered to me.

But there were also two undeniable truths.

“To be in love, there have to be two people,” I told him, “and you and I are not in love.”

It was something I had always said to him, which I thought would be a clue that I meant it the same way. Between him and me, there were never two people who were in love. There was one person who cared, one person who tried, one person who learned to trust and poured love into a friendship — me. And there was one person who mocked it, insulted it, berated it, and made it something ugly — him.

The other truth was this:

He hurt me devastatingly by telling me the only reason he started being friends with me was for sex. Which means the friendship was just a con. All of a sudden, the way he treated me throughout the years, and particularly after we had sex, made sense.

I mentioned L only to explain the difference. What I felt there was recognition — media naranja — a love that felt whole, whether or not it ever became anything, and I respected it. What I felt with this man was aferrado: clinging, sick passion, attached but not clean.

Maybe that is why every time L came up, the little cuts started.

I had always known how I felt. It could never be more. I gave my trust, my care, my loyalty to a friendship with him. Or so I thought.

The sex was something I had allowed out of trust. Only later was I able to understand those years of trust were years of manipulation.

When he started to explain why it would never work between us, I realized immediately that this outing would be taking an unexpected detour.

I let him reveal himself.

Boy, I wish I hadn’t.

He went on about why he could not love me. Why we were different. Dress styles. Movie styles. Religions. Taste. All of it laid out as if he had ever really tried to know me.

He had not.

We had never gone to see one movie together. I invited him out — to coffee, to walks, to ordinary things friends do when they are trying to know each other better — and he never had the time. I had tried to talk to him about politics, and he low-key told me it was not for women to talk about. I had tried to show him what I liked, and he barely tried to get into it. Even as a friend, he did not try.

And something in me cracked open.

Not because I wanted him.

Because I finally heard him.

And I was free of that sick, clingy poison.

He was telling me, in all his careful little ways, that he had treated me as less than because he saw me as less than. He could soften it. He could dress it up. He could lie through his teeth and say otherwise. But when you do not listen to someone, when you do not give them effort, when you touch their life without honoring their personhood, you have already said what you believe.

The truth is, I am plenty fucking amazing.

The truth is, I am worth everything.

And I am tired of translating someone else’s cruelty into a language that hurts me less.

He talked about L too. Every time L came up, there were comments. Little cuts. He would tell me L did not go out. L did not see people. L would not respond to me anymore. Years before, he had told me similar things. He told me L did not want to see me. He told me not to bother him. He told me L thought I was crazy. He made himself the translator between me and someone I cared about.

I trusted the wrong interpreter.

I trusted him because he stood close to people I loved.

That is one of the hardest truths to hold. I mistook proximity for safety. I thought because he was close to L, close to L’s father, close to the house, close to the story, that he could be trusted with parts of me.

But access is not safety.

Familiarity is not safety.

A man standing near someone you love is still capable of harming you.

For a moment, I thought about calling him a monster throughout this essay because I needed a word big enough for what my body knew before my mouth could say it.

But maybe that gave him too much credit.

He was not a creature from a story. He was not some ancient evil. He was not special.

He was a man.

A man I trusted.

A man who knew how to sound wounded while making me unsafe.

A man who used language, sympathy, trauma, and access to make me doubt myself.

A man who stood close enough to love that I confused him for protection.

And maybe that is the part I have to stop dressing up.

Not because he deserves softness.

Because I deserve clarity.

And that is where it should have ended.

Where it should have ended.

But it didn’t. I was unwell. And I was stuck. Compromised.

And this was right where he wanted me.

Because he wasn’t going to give up unless he tried.

At the park, he told me about his childhood. His heartbreaks. His embarrassments. His traumas. He told me things I know are hard to tell. I know what it means for the body to carry stories it can barely survive speaking.

And still, something in me grew angry.

Not because I had no compassion.

Because I could see where he wanted the story to go.

He let go of my hand because he saw it in my eyes.

I wasn’t buying it.

Still, the child in me wanted to reassure him. I was high. I did not feel well. I was not sure about anything except the old instinct to comfort pain when I saw it. So I leaned in and hugged him. I kissed his forehead.

And then my body remembered something before my mind did.

I moved away quickly.

He laughed and said something sexual. Something vile. Something that turned my compassion into a target.

Who does that?

After saying what he had said?

Who takes a moment of tenderness and makes it unsafe?

I had already told him I was not feeling well while smoking. He knew I was impaired. He knew. And still, he pushed. Still, he watched. Still, he seemed disappointed the outing was not becoming whatever he had imagined it would become.

Near the end of the outing, I kept saying how much clarity I had. I said it was one of the best days of my life because I finally understood him. I went there to sit with my “monster” face to face and say, in my own way, “I see that you are damaged, and I hope one day you sit with yourself, apologize to yourself, and heal.”

Technically, that was the first thing I said right after that “te amo,” and that is where that outing should have ended.

But it didn’t.

It was never going to.

Because he was trying to get something completely different, and he wasn’t getting it. Nothing he was trying was working.

So he tried one more thing.

“One more thing. You remember that night?”

I did not want to repeat it again.

“Yes. What?”

“When you told me you wanted to suck my dick.”

I recoiled.

I started to say what I remembered. That he forced my head to his face. That he forced my hand down his pants.

He interrupted.

He tried to redirect the memory back into something he could live with.

He said I had made it sound like I was only there to talk, not for sex. Like he had violated me or something.

And there it was.

I wasn’t out of the thicket yet. Not entirely.

My body knew before I did.

I went there to talk.

I had not gone there for sex.

I had felt forced from the moment he forced my head to kiss him. From the moment he forced my hand down his pants. I didn’t want to have sex; that’s why I asked if he wanted head. This was not kink. This was not play. There was no permission being asked for and freely given.

There was pressure.

And he knew that.

He knew my history. He knew what I had survived. He knew the places in me that had already been hurt.

And still, he pushed.

I felt forced to keep going. Forced to get on top of him because he wouldn’t cum, because it would not end, because my brain had already gone into that place where the only instruction left was: just get it over with.

“It was what you said.”

My body was yelling at me.

I had softened the truth for him because I had been softening it for myself.

I did not forget.

I refused to call it what it was.

I refused because calling it what it was meant remembering the promise I had made myself: to never let any man touch me like that again.

Because I had made a terrifying promise to myself if a man ever did.

And a man did.

When that truth landed, I needed everyone with me. I couldn’t be alone. I was actually very scared to be by myself. I hated what my brain was doing. I love, however, how my family, therapists, friends, and ancestors/spirit came through. This honestly hasn’t been easy to get through, and with their help, I have been getting through it.

I kept talking down to myself, saying, “I swore I was smart. I swore I was intelligent. I went through this before. Why didn’t I know?” No measure of intelligence, no measure of trauma, could have prepared me for this. My therapists have reassured me that this could have happened to anyone and that this wasn’t my fault. And I have reassured myself of that same fact every day since I have settled with the truth.

People sometimes don’t understand that the body remembers before the story is ready. Sometimes you do not forget the facts. You forget the name. You remember what happened. You remember what was said. You remember the room, the feeling, the sickness, the way your brain said: just get it over with.

But you do not call it what it is.

Not yet.

Because naming it would tear down the whole structure you built to survive around it.

And I had built a structure.

I called it friendship.

I called it care.

I called it love.

I called it healing.

I called it facing my fear.

I called it wanting everyone to get along.

But the truth was simpler and more painful.

I was manipulated by him.

I was raped by him.

It happened.

It is fucking shitty and fucked up and terrible, and it sucks, and that’s putting it so fucking lightly.

And I have to sit with that truth without shaming myself for it.

I loved him. I thought he was my friend.

And now I know I had been convincing myself and everyone I know that I still loved him, and everyone looked at me like something was a tad broken in me, and it turns out, yeah — they were right. He was even more vile than I could admit, and the reality was more than I could handle.

I hated him. I hated myself. I had been dressing that hatred as love because love was the language I knew best. I love genuinely. I love deeply. I pour care into people. I make meaning. I try to understand where pain comes from.

But understanding someone is not the same as excusing them.

Compassion is not consent.

Pain does not make a person safe.

Trauma does not make a person harmless.

And my love was never supposed to be the place where someone else hid their violence.

The day after the park, he checked in. I told him I had onion bulbs for him and to come upstairs. When he did, he stopped on the steps.

“Why only here? Come up to the garden,” I said.

He said there were too many people upstairs.

“It’s my brother,” I told him.

He said it was better when it was just us.

Then I saw him grab himself.

And my brain started screaming.

This was not a misunderstanding.

This was not friendship.

This was not healing.

This was sickness.

He had done something similar before. On New Year’s, I had invited him and L upstairs. He told me L had gone to his room as soon as he heard me knock. He told me he would rather it be just us.

It all got louder.

The pattern started making a sound.

Then came the broom.

L needed it, or said he needed it, for the backyard. I was still trying to finish the front. When he saw me, he retreated. I could feel him looking for distance, and my old fear rose up.

“If you don’t like me, if you don’t want to be around me, just say it.”

There it was again.

The fear of being hated.

The fear of asking and hearing the answer I had been trained to expect.

He reassured me in his own way that he just needed the broom. But when I came back, the broom and dustpan were gone.

And I panicked.

I was angry.

I was lost.

I needed that broom.

Or I thought I did.

But the panic was not about the broom.

It was about the spell breaking.

I had been trying to clean the house with intentions that were not true. I had been trying to fix a problem I could not fix. I had been trying to create harmony in a place where my own body was still telling the truth and I was still asking it to wait.

The broom mattered because it belonged to the house.

But I do not belong to a house more than I belong to myself.

The intentions were not working because I was not setting them for myself.

I was setting them for peace.

For everyone.

For the house.

For the fantasy.

For the photo finish.

For the version where everyone heals because I stayed soft enough.

But I was not setting them from the truth.

The truth is that the loops only stop when I recognize what happened, name it, and stop shaming and hating myself for surviving it.

The truth is that I have to stop silencing myself for men.

Stop writing it only in poetry for the world or my soul to decipher.

Say it simply.

Say it painfully, so I understand.

I was manipulated.

I was raped.

It happened.

I cannot control whether he ever looks at himself and recognizes the harm he has done. I don’t know if I’m the only one he’s done something like this to. I can’t control whether anyone believes me. I can’t control what people do with the truth once it leaves my mouth.

But I can stop abandoning myself in advance.

I can stop making him larger than he is.

He is not a “monster.”

He is a man who harmed me.

And I am a woman who remembers.

A woman who has hated herself for having put herself through this generational bullshit for so damn long.

A woman who is learning to forgive herself for it.

So for that, thank you.

And I also have to be honest: L hurt me too.

Not in the same way. Not in the same place. But he hurt me.

And as much as I love him, as much as I want to give him grace, I cannot use grace to silence myself. I cannot make my love for him another place where I disappear.

I can thank him for the small things that helped me come back to myself. I can love him. I can wish him healing.

But I can also tell the truth: his absence hurt me. His distance hurt me. His silence hurt me.

And I am no longer willing to call that nothing just because I understand where it may have come from.

In Muisca belief, we are all reflections of one another. So if I saw myself reflected in you, L — in your wounds, in your distance, in your light, in whatever part of you I recognized before I had language for it — then maybe you are in for one beautiful ride in this lifetime.

The journey is great, king.

Messy, but beautiful.

Please take it.

With so much love and gratitude.

I have entered a kind of peace in knowing now.

Something I didn’t get when I was younger.

Or a decade ago.

I know it now, through myself in the present.

Through my body.

Through my mind.

Through the part of me that finally understood my love was real, but my endurance was not proof of it.

Through the part of me that finally let the story become plain.

A garden was never going to make the house a home.

The broom was never going to heal the house.

But losing it helped me stop lying to myself.

And that is where everything started looking much cleaner.

support/assistance/help if you ever need it ( they will be posted on the other content heavy blogs/ essays as well):

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-4673

 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988

 Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741
 

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 or text START to 88788

https://pflag.org/resource/support-hotlines/


Call or text 1-844-7NATIVE / 1-844-762-8483. StrongHearts offers 24/7 confidential and anonymous support

https://www.niwrc.org/

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help/

Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860 in the U.S. / 877-330-6366 in Canada

If you are in immediate danger, call 911 or your local emergency number.

Do We Ever Really Forget?

That was the question I asked myself while talking with my brother, then with my prima.

I don’t remember how the conversation ended. I don’t remember what happened after. But I remember how you looked at me.

I remember that night's talk with softness and clarity but everything else with vagueness. I remember asking you to talk to me with respect, and you didn’t. I remember asking you to respect certain boundaries, and you didn’t. But I never got to talk to you about what hurt me afterward, because you never seemed comfortable enough with me in person again for that to happen.

And I respected that.

We had both gone through a similar pain, and I wanted to respect your boundary. I care for you so deeply. But as the years went on, I realized it went deeper than respect.

It was fear.

I was afraid of how you would react to my care, to my love. I was afraid you would reject it. That you would hate me.

It was a fear I had with my father. When he would avoid speaking to me, I would want to ignore him back or confront him, but my mother would tell me not to. Just “kiss him on the cheek,” respond gently, ask him about his day, and move along.

So I would do that with you.

Because that is what I knew how to do.

I hadn’t experienced this any other way.

So, of course, when he came along and told me how close you were, when he said he could speak for me to you, I believed him. And when he told me what you thought of me, the things you called me and said, I believed him too, because it hadn’t been the first time someone had said those things.

I even said I understood.

Apparently, that comes from my mother too. A person who seems to have been blamed for everything since she was a child. A person who was held responsible for most things, who tends to feel responsible for things that are not her fault, who blames herself for what men do, and sometimes blames women for the faults of men, because that is what she was brought up with.

Hell, she even gave that gift to me.

So I understood the treatment because, in my mind, I deserved it.

I thought you used me. I thought you didn’t want to deal with me because I was just some crazy, overly attached person.

That was it.

You already acted as if I didn’t exist. My greetings went to the walls instead of you. My warmth met your chill.

Years of someone being there, altering the scene.

There were moments when I thought there might be a chance for us to talk again, and I tried. But then I thought you were going to use me, so I confronted you. Somehow, it became you confronting me about thinking you were being used. And when I tried to explain that I wouldn’t even be able to use you, you said you “didn’t care” to know.

And that was it.

I became unwell. I went away. I came back, and there he was.

Always the better talker. Always there. Always listening. Always dependable. Always trying to make me feel safe.

And after what I had been through that month, I knew I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose him the way I lost you.

I couldn’t make that mistake twice.

You were there in the background because I could feel you there. I could feel you in my gut. That feeling when you know you care for someone, when you know you love someone, and it never goes away.

Is that feeling one-sided?

I feel that way. I know what I feel within my spirit. Within myself. But am I feeling you as well? Can I speak for you?

It would be unfair to do so in so many ways. It is only fair for you to speak for yourself.

And you have been silent on your side.

I mean, that day I gave you an opening to say you didn’t want to be near me or that you didn’t care, you didn’t say it.

And I took note.

But do you?

Do you know what happened?

Do you know what I’m going through right now?

That smooth liar lies, but every once in a while, he can be sincere. He says you do. And if so…

Do you know what it is like to live in this body? To settle into this fucking reality? To fight and struggle with telling yourself it isn’t your fault, because you know it isn’t, but to still hear your mind tell you it is, because you’ve always been told it’s your fucking fault?

Maybe you think it’s my fault too.

Maybe that’s why you don’t talk to me.

And if so, maybe it’s best you stay away.

Actually, I don’t know what you think. I don’t know what you feel. I don’t know anything.

That’s what causes the ache. I make my own assumptions, and it gets unhealthy.

And I can’t keep aching over a feeling in my gut that might only belong to me.

Not right now.

Right now, I have to make myself whole again.

Because some piece of shit thought he could take what he wanted from me, and then tried to degrade me by reminding me of his traumas and that night, as if that would soften what he did.

Only it didn’t soften anything.

It reminded me of what happened.

And I fucking softened it for him.

I softened it because I was so messed up. I couldn’t admit it to myself, even after hearing myself repeat what happened to me. Even after hearing him repeat what he said.

That it was what it was.

I told him, “It was just the words.”

Just the words, while my body was literally screaming.

While my face was in flames.

While my brain was giving every sincere effort to forget, like it had before.

That was what I was trying to forget.

That was what I was trying to “fix” and “heal” and “control.”

That damn memory.

“Perdonar y olvidar,” like he says.

Only I couldn’t.

I couldn’t forgive and forget him.

I love you.

But you are still not here.

So that must mean what I feel is only here.

In me.

Alone.

I only have my brothers, my chosen family, my friends, and myself.

I love you. Purely. Genuinely. That is real. That feeling is tangible and real.

But anything you feel for me, until proven otherwise, is imagined.

I walked into that apartment thinking of how, one day, it would be great to hang out with you there again. Seeing a movie. Talking about anything. Just being. Maybe all of us could be there some day. He even talked about us going camping someday. All of us. So I walked in. Into a threat. Thinking:

Not sick.

Not scared.

And I did it scared. Afraid. Sick. Alone with him before our outing, telling myself it was just “exposure therapy,” all part of this grand “healing” of the “house.”

And I wrack my brain knowing that I put myself, my body, and my peace in danger for that love. For the idea of all of us being in the same room together someday.

In peace.

Because I genuinely thought I could heal all of this.

But I can’t.

It’s about me.

It has always been about me.

No matter how much I try not to make it.

I can’t heal this house.

Not my brothers.

Not the people who hurt me.

No matter how much I love them.

No matter how much I hate them.

I have to stop trying.

La Nena Con El Mandrake- Evy Gonzalez Ronceria, 2013

If I were Steven Crain...

I would have let the house turn its lights back on.

Not all at once. Not like a miracle. Slowly, the way a body remembers warmth after years of mistaking the cold for home. One room first. Then another. A purple glow at the ceiling. A small lamp in the corner. A ghost watching over the walls, no longer hungry, no longer waiting to swallow the people who live here.

Because I am color returning.

And this is not a house that eats its inhabitants.

This is a house that learned pain and decided not to become it. A house that remembers every slammed door, every silence, every shadow that stretched too long across the floor — and still chooses shelter. Still chooses softness. Still says, come inside, I will not hurt you here.

When the rest is violent confetti, this house gathers what is left of me and does not call it mess. It does not sweep me away. It does not ask me to become smaller, quieter, easier to keep. It lets every torn piece land. It makes a floor of them. It makes a sky.

The haunting is still here, but it has changed its work. It does not trap me. It guards me. It does not drag me backward. It keeps watch while I sleep. It holds the old grief in the walls so I do not have to carry all of it in my hands.

I am not leaving the haunted house.

I am teaching it how to love me.

And one by one, the lights come back on.

Swept Under

I swept and cleaned
every inch of my room,
to the hallway,
to the kitchen,
to the living room,

with the prayers
my abuela taught me:

Buenas energías adentro.
Malas energías pa’ fuera.

But it wasn’t enough.

Because it was
the whole house.

So I swept down the stairs
and out,
and continued
to sweep.

But it wasn’t enough.

So I used water
to cleanse the dirt
and planted
new plants,
some to ward away
rodents from the trash,

and I kept saying,

Mala energía pa’ fuera.

And swept.

But it still didn’t seem

To do the work.

The paint needed work.
The house
needed healing.

Then one day,
he took the broom,

and everything got
dirty
again.

It wasn’t that
it was impossible
for me to ask.

For me to get one.

For me to do it.

It’s that it was
that broom
performing that task.

That magic.

It was doing
that healing.

And if it wasn’t,
it wouldn’t work.

(What wouldn’t work?)

The cleaning.

(What cleaning?)

Of the house.

(That’s not what you want to clean.)

The healing of the house—

(No.)

What are you trying to sa—

(What are you not saying?)
(What are you not seeing?)
(What are you not accepting?)
(What are you not grieving?)

(You cannot heal)
(what you cannot accept.)

What am I not naming?

(What happened to you.)
(In this house.)

(You cannot heal)
(if you cannot accept)
(that it happened.)

(You cannot clean it.)
(You cannot wash it away.)
(You cannot make it beautiful.)
(You cannot forget it.)

(You remember.)

I remember.

(And it hurts.)

And it hurts.

(And you’re angry.)

And I’m angry.

(And you feel ashamed.)

And I feel ashamed.

(Don’t.)

(You feel scared?)

Yes.

(Don’t.)

(Someone took something.)

Yes.

(I’m sorry.)

(We will get it back.)
(But not like this.)

Okay.

(Not by cleaning this house.)
(Not by planting flowers.)
(Not by healing this place.)

(This place isn’t you.)

(You need to grieve.)

I need to grieve.

(You need to accept.)

I need to accept.

(You need to heal.)

I need to heal.

(Not the house.)
(Not the people in it.)
(Not the one who harmed you.)

(You.)

(You don’t need the broom.)

I don’t need the broom.

(Breathe.)

Thank you.

Frozen Oranges In Little Rooms

I was never genuinely good with change.

I mean, from the moment I was removed from my mother’s womb, I reacted by choking myself with my umbilical cord. And when that didn’t work, apparently I was constantly unswaddling myself. I hated — hated — being out of my comfort zone. I have never been one to enjoy when someone moves something in my world.

I have AuDHD, so it’s not always that I will notice and lose it the way my father would. But my body will notice. My body will feel the shift. My body will get emotional and register the loss before I even understand what has gone missing.

Lately, I have been very present in my own life. For a person who tends to anxiously dwell in the past and focus-jump into the void of the future — well, it used to look like a void; now it just looks scrambled, because I never thought I would live this long — the present is actually an amazing place to be.

I realize now that I haven’t always been reflecting so much as drowning in my past lakes. That is why my present was so hard to live in. That is why my future seemed so bleak. It is okay to reflect, but as soon as you feel your old self pulling you in, you have to pull back and walk away. You do not need to dip into, or fall into, any place you no longer need to enter.

And anytime you go back to past lakes that are too dark or too deep, always grab a line and tie it to a strong tree. That way, if you get caught by your reflection, you can pull yourself up and find your way back out.

I have felt more in my body, more in tune, more here, than I have been since I was maybe sixteen or so — before I knew what had happened to me, before I had language for certain violences, before I knew anything about my summers in Colombia as a kid. Even before that age, I was never completely whole. Pieces of me had already been taken, and I had already lived through physical and mental abuse I was well aware of. But I felt there. I lived. I owned myself, and ferociously so.

Today, we were driving through my old neighborhood, and my brother and I realized the old bagel place we went to growing up was closed again. It had been closed for over a month now, and my brother mentioned the old lady who worked there.

I remembered her from elementary school and junior high school. She made the best plain bagel with cream cheese. To me, it felt like heaven: that thick block of Philadelphia cream cheese sliced off and slabbed — PLOP, SLAP — onto the bagel. It did not need to be toasted because it was just that fresh. And it was $1.10.

Yes. $1.10.

I would pass by every once in a while as the years went by, and the years had made her smaller. They had curled her into something that would make anyone’s bones ache. Inflation made the bagel more expensive, of course, but it was still fucking delicious.

I was sad because I hoped the inevitable whispers of Mother had not asked for her return again. Even though I know living in that kind of ache is no life for a woman who spent more than half her life standing and making those delicious bagels — bagels she had made for my older brothers too.

But I also hoped some piece-of-crap mogul had not taken this mother and daughter out of their bagel business.

And then I started to room-inate.

Farther down, we drove to the place where there used to be a swimming pool. It was completely demolished.

There was once a pool there where only white kids went — seriously — because none of us could afford to go. Now it was closed. Gone. Leveled.

We found it interesting that when they finally — finally — made it reasonably priced enough to let everyone in, it only took a few years for them to shut the pool club down and demolish it completely.

It felt like it spoke to something larger about the kind of community we were part of. When I was a kid, I wanted so badly to go into that pool club. I would peek into it all the time and ask my parents why we couldn’t go. As I got older, I started to understand how discriminatory that place was. There was a reason so many people could not get in. The pricing was designed so lower-income people could not access the pool, and since the majority of lower-income people in our neighborhood came from marginalized communities, it made exclusion easy.

As an adult, finding out that this had changed made me happy.

Until they closed it down.

And it made me see that sometimes watching youth thrive where your family had once been denied access is not only a correction. It is a kind of grief too. Because the door finally opened, and then the whole building disappeared.

Roominate.

Then we passed the field.

The field where I used to play with my dogs. Where I spent countless snow days. Where I watched my friends play their team games. Where I ran track. Where I drank until I forgot why I was even there. Where I cut through for shortcuts. Where I played handball. Where I hid away from the problems at home.

It was completely covered up.

“Wonder what they’re doing to it,” my brother said.

I looked at it blankly.

“Probably some commercial development,” I joked.

But then something filled me with dread.

What if it was commercial development? What if it was another building? What if they were taking the field down because it was no longer serving its purpose? What if it was just taking up space, and they needed to build something new?

Roomination.

As we started to make the turn, we saw my favorite place.

The Historical House.

But it looked different too. All the windows were covered. Something was definitely happening there.

The field and the House?

Are they going to take the House?

This house was here when I came back as a little girl. This is the house I pointed out behind Willie in Paris Is Burning and said, “THEY FILMED HERE!”

And he said, “Yes, they did, baby girl.”

Willie, who taught me to be who I am and to never settle for less. The grandest person — and his mom! — you could ever get to grow up around as your neighbor.

I saw that house in all its phases. I met my friend Joel — Pigeon — in that house, and never was a drop of wine wasted there. Words were sold at valuable offers, and boy, were they worth every bit spent.

I miss him daily. I think of him often. And I wondered what would happen if they ever did anything to that Historical House.

After all, that wasn’t its first place of living. The House had its bones somewhere else before its feet were cut, lifted, and placed near my childhood home. It had a rough time getting used to us, but now it has been well over thirty-five years. Now it is comfortable. Now it has found its shape and skin and settled here.

So what is happening to it now?

Room in ate.

Room in ation.

Rooms.

Matt Berninger’s “Frozen Oranges” began to play in the car.

I think the rooms in my mind heard the words before I had a chance to hear them. I began to tear up, and I did not quite understand what was going on. I was having a particularly good morning. We got bagels from the other really good place we love. I felt good. We were laughing and joking around.

So why was I feeling this way?

Then Matt sang about frozen oranges in the trees in Indiana. Crystal apples in the creeks. Swimming in a limestone quarry. Saturday.

And I realized it was, indeed, Saturday.

But more than that, Matt was singing about a memory. About childhood. About nostalgia.

And here I was, in my old neighborhood, in my rooms, watching them tumble down and change all around me.

And I smiled.

I was sad. I was so sad. I was grieving. Because I kept asking, What’s happening? But underneath that, I was really asking: What’s going to happen to my memories? What’s going to happen to all the things I lived? To all the things that happened here? Are they gone if this is gone?

And the answer came almost immediately.

Yes, because it was gone a long time ago.

The moment already happened, babe. You lived it. And as long as you live, the moment lives. And once you’re gone, the moment goes into the memory of all things.

Huh.

As easy as that.

No, it still hurts. Change hurts. But it makes way for some really beautiful things sometimes, so be open to it. Not all change is bad. Don’t settle for less because it is comfortable.

Oh, I’ll never sett—

I’ll never settle.

I said it to myself for the first time in a very long time.

I said it when I was younger, but I do not think I understood the meaning then. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe when I was choking myself with the umbilical cord, unswaddling myself, being the ultimate colicky bebé, my spirit was already saying, This body was just not enough, and it did not yet have the language to explain itself.

I was always uncomfortable in myself. People took from me and absorbed me, which made me want to hide more. People would say I was capable of more, or that I was scary, or imposing, because I could speak my mind. Because I could say how I felt. Because I could see through them, or listen, or understand, or whatever gift they wanted from me while resenting me for having it.

I used to cower. I used to get upset. I used to try to be lower. Shut down. Act differently. Mask.

And in the past couple of years, I have decided: truly, fuck it.

I am going to be myself. I am going to love myself and ignore what anyone else thinks or wants me to be. I am going to accept that I am this pure, loving, caring, intuitive, empathetic, bold, assertive person who wants the best for herself and for the people she loves.

And if people cannot get behind that, great. If they can, great too. But if they want to be a dick about it, they can fuck right off. I am not here for their bullshit.

I realized I am capable of change. In fact, I welcome it.

Change is good and needed at times so beautiful things can be born and flourish. We can be the creators of beautiful things in our own lives. We can be the change we choose to see.

And not everything is necessarily changed forever. All we have to do is travel to the rooms in our minds. We can ruminate, yes, but we can also remember beautifully.

I have these little rooms in my head, decorated and lovely, full of thoughts and things and places that remind me of my past. Wonderful things. Angry things. Sad things. All the things that make up me.

And for the first time in my life, I see myself as a monster I can bear to look at — and even love to admire — instead of something I can only other, or speak of in shadows.

I appreciate these rooms because they give me a greater appreciation of my present. They give me love for what I have now, for whom I have around me, and a greater awareness of how I want to spend my time.

They also make me think about my future. But not too far ahead. I am realistic now, and hopeful. I understand that we live in a world changing so constantly that it would be ridiculous for me to think too far ahead. I think as far as I am realistically allowed to think at this point, with how everything is going.

And honestly? It has been a lot better than I thought it would be.

It took me almost forty years for my spirit to finally adjust to my body, and I have to say: choking myself with my umbilical cord might seem a tad dramatic, but looking back and seeing what a dumpster fire this timeline has been, I can understand why the fuck I did such an insane thing.

I would never settle for such a terrible timeline.

So, BRB. I’m going to make something beautiful in this timeline.

Because fuck hoping. We have to make it.

Falling Up

Let the pieces
fall where they may,
they say.

Let it happen,
they said.

As we
fall downward,
the crescent of the moon
flips us all.

I fall up
with you
in the whirlwind,
where all the chaos
seems to be taking everything
into its
unbelievable mouth.

We seem to float here
in something close to solid,
fine
laughing,

holding onto —
or maybe
being held by —
this see-less
line.

Yeah,
maybe this holds
us
just fine.

We breathe
as if air
just found us,

or at least
that’s what
it feels like:

a first real breath
in,
sigh,
and
out.

Is this what
letting go
feels like?

Weightless,
being
in calamity.

It’s all good,
knowing
I got
you.

Wires

Clarissa was dying to fit into a size 4 before her office Christmas party.

She had been battling the bulge since she was fourteen and a size fourteen. She had done everything: bingeing and purging, anorexia, diet pills, the ThighMaster, even enemas. Now, at twenty-nine, after all the damage she had done to herself in the name of becoming smaller, she decided that maybe, this time around, she would be kinder to her body. She joined Weight Watchers. She ate right. She worked out. She got herself down to a size 8.

For a while, it worked.

Her old jeans slid off her hips. She started wearing tighter clothes and got the kind of attention she had always wanted. For the first time in years, she began to feel beautiful. Desired. Visible.

Then the unthinkable happened.

She hit a plateau.

She could not lose another pound. She changed her diet plan. Nothing. Worked out five days a week, then seven. Nothing. Ate even less. Nothing. She went to her doctor, and he gave her the answer she most wanted to hear.

“Maybe this is the size you’re meant to be.”

Fuck you, she thought.

Every day after that, she looked in the mirror and swore she was getting bigger. Her hips looked wider. Her stomach looked softer. Fat seemed to be creeping back over her body in real time, colonizing her inch by inch. December was closing in. If she was going to fit into a size 4 before the party, she was going to have to do something drastic.

Something crazy.

So she did.

She took some vacation time, told everyone at work she was going to Antigua, and used the Antigua money to pay for a procedure no decent doctor would perform on someone who did not absolutely need it. It took a few extra Benjamins and a few doctors with flexible morals, but eventually she found the right man for the job.

A few hours later she came out dizzy, swollen-faced, and clutching a slip of paper with Vicodin scrawled across it.

At the pharmacy, she tried to ask for it.

All that came out was a wet, distorted sound.

The pharmacist stared.

Clarissa tried again, prying her mouth open just enough for the metal to glint at the corners. The smell of iron rode out on her breath. A thread of bloody drool slipped from her mouth, tapped the prescription in her hand, and clung there for a second before breaking.

The pharmacist recoiled, snatched the paper from her, and told her to sit down.

For you see, Clarissa had wired her jaw shut.

She knew the quickest way to lose weight was not to eat anything. Duh.

An hour later she was back home, half-drugged and weirdly happy. Thus began her three-week descent into thin-dom.

At first, it was miserable.

She lived mostly on juice. When she felt brave enough, she left the apartment and bought fruit to make smoothies. She was terrible at making them. Half the time they came out so acidic they made her stomach revolt. And if it came up instead of going down, she was in real trouble, because, well, her jaw was wired shut.

So sometimes she had to swallow her pride.

And swallow her chunks.

That part made her violent with anger. Not because it hurt, though it did, but because she counted it as consumption. Every accidental mouthful felt like failure.

Still, the days passed. She got better at the smoothies. She stopped taking the Vicodin. She worked out normally again. The fat began to fall off her body. She watched herself sharpen.

Her legs grew toned. Her stomach flattened enough to hint at a two-pack. Her ribs began to show. Her arms no longer jiggled. Her ass no longer wiggled.

She was losing weight.

She was happy.

But she was happy for another reason, too.

Dan from accounting.

Dan was one of those men every office eventually grows: handsome, easy, broad-shouldered, effortlessly desired. The kind of man women whispered about and, if the rumors were to be believed, occasionally passed around in supply closets. Clarissa had never been one of those women.

That was the wound.

Dan was always warm with her. He smiled at her. Had lunch with her. Dinner once. A movie another time. He remembered things she said. Asked questions. Looked at her when she spoke as though the answer mattered. But Clarissa, being Clarissa, mistook all of that for almost-interest. Near-desire. The kind of attention a man gave a woman he might sleep with if she were just a little prettier, a little smaller, a little more worth wanting.

Rumor had it he wasn’t into thick girls.

That rumor had lived in her for months.

So now, with her body finally whittled down to something she thought might earn his appetite, she intended to collect.

By the time the Christmas party arrived, Clarissa fit into the size 4.

She found the perfect black dress. It hugged her breasts, her little waist, the round curve of her ass. It dipped low in the front to show cleavage and lower in the back to reveal the spray of freckles over one shoulder blade that resembled, to her mind, the constellation of Dionysus. On her feet she wore sleek red pumps. A thin gold chain circled her neck. Pale lips. Sharp cat-eye liner over her big, round hazel eyes.

She looked expensive.

She looked edible.

While admiring herself, and not entirely innocently, she forgot about her appointment to have the wires removed.

She remembered too late.

By the time she caught a cab to the doctor’s office, he had already left for the day. She stood outside the locked door in her black dress and red heels, jaw wired shut, and nearly screamed.

But that wasn’t going to stop her.

She looked sexy. She felt good. She wanted Dan.

She was going to that fucking party.

The reaction when she walked in almost made the whole ordeal worth it.

“Clare? Oh my God.”

“Is that you?”

“You look amazing.”

“Antigua did you right.”

She smiled carefully, only showing her front teeth, and moved through the room on a tide of compliments. The wires weren’t obvious unless she opened too wide. As long as she kept her mouth controlled, she could pass.

At the bar she spotted him immediately: black jacket, broad back, an ass that refused to quit.

She touched his shoulder blade and let her fingers drift across it.

“Hello, Dan,” she said through her teeth.

He turned, stared, then did a full double take.

“Holy shit, Clare.”

He grinned like he genuinely meant it. Then he wrapped his arms around her, lifted her clean off the ground, and spun her once. Clarissa laughed behind closed lips, drunk on the fact that he was touching her at all.

They ordered vodka tonics and started talking.

Dan complained about accounting, about work, about half the idiots in the building. He told her he’d missed her. Told her she looked incredible. Then, softer, while his eyes drifted over the back of her dress, he smiled and said, “You know, I always liked that little cluster of freckles on your shoulder. The one that looks like a constellation.”

Clarissa blinked.

“The constellation of Dionysus,” he added, almost shyly.

He had noticed.

Of course, because she was Clarissa and therefore committed to misunderstanding every decent thing done to her, she barely heard him. While he was seeing her, she was imagining peeling his clothes off with her teeth.

When he took her hand and asked if she wanted to come with him to the buffet, she followed without hesitation.

The company had clearly blown money this year. The buffet was obscene. Wagyu sliders. Dumplings. Poke spoons lined up on ice. Spring rolls. Prosciutto-wrapped asparagus. Buffalo wings. Bacon-wrapped scallops. Mini pizzas. Cupcakes with towers of buttercream.

Dan loaded a plate and asked if she wanted anything.

She shook her head.

Then her stomach lurched.

In between getting dressed and touching herself to thoughts of Dan, she had forgotten to drink her dinner. She punched herself lightly in the gut, as though she could bully the hunger back into submission.

Dan kept talking beside her, picking up a buffalo wing with his fingers, tearing meat from it with slow distracted bites.

And then it happened.

Clarissa could smell everything.

Not just smell it. Hear it. Taste it. Feel it pressing in on her from every direction. The buttercream on the cupcakes. The garlic on the asparagus. The hot iron tang of the rare Wagyu. The vinegar sting of the wing sauce. The sweet salt of teriyaki and soy clinging to dumplings. Her stomach gurgled so loudly it seemed to boom in her ears.

Dan’s voice began to drown.

All she could hear was chewing.

The wet smack of gums. The tearing of meat. The grinding of teeth. The obscene intimacy of people eating while she stood there with her mouth tied shut like punishment.

The sounds dug into her.

The hunger made her shake.

She stared at Dan as he licked sauce from his thumb and felt something ugly and ravenous rise up inside her. It wasn’t just hunger anymore. It was humiliation. Want. Envy. Rage.

As he lifted the last buffalo wing toward his mouth, Clarissa snatched it from his hand.

Dan blinked.

Clarissa shoved it toward her own mouth and tried to force her jaw open.

“NNNNGGH—”

Pain lit through her face.

The wing slipped from her hand. Blood spattered from the corners of her mouth. Still she bent after it, desperate, sucking wing sauce through the tiny gaps in her teeth.

“Sss. Ssssss. Sss.”

She got some of it. Enough to taste vinegar, heat, salt. Enough for little strands of chicken to catch against the outside of the wire.

Dan’s whole expression changed.

“Clarissa,” he said, stepping toward her. “Hey. Hey, are you okay? What’s wrong with your mouth?”

The people nearest the buffet went quiet.

“Clare?”

“Is that wire?”

“Oh my God, she’s bleeding.”

Clarissa felt herself drop straight through time.

She was fourteen again. Huge again. Ridiculous again. Everyone was looking. Sauce on her face. Blood on her lip. Their voices blurred until it sounded like laughter inside her skull.

And there was Dan.

Not even Dan, really. Just the final witness. The last pair of eyes to watch her fail.

Her stomach cramped. Her head pounded. All she wanted was for the hunger to stop.

And she could not eat a damn thing.

She felt the gaze of her coworkers devouring her.

She began to crash out.

Her heartbeat thudded in her temples. The smell of food thickened until it felt alive. Her hands shook. Dan, poor stupid Dan, reached for her forehead with a napkin, concern plain on his face.

“Clare, honey—”

“GET OFF ME. I’M FUCKING STARVING.”

She slapped his hand away so hard the napkin fell.

Then she dropped to the floor, shoved through the bodies around her, and lunged for the cutlery.

Someone shouted.

Clarissa grabbed a fork.

With one hand she hooked her fingers into the inside of her cheek and yanked it outward. With the other she drove the fork into the wires lacing her jaw together. The metal slipped. Scraped. Caught. She stabbed again. The prongs skidded off tooth and gum. On the third jab they snagged.

That was the feeling.

Not clean slicing. Not simple tearing.

Snagging.

Like chicken wire catching fabric and refusing to let go. Like hooked metal grabbing the slick inside of her cheek and dragging it with it. The wire bit into her fingers, her gums, the tender wet lining of her mouth. Blood came all at once — hot, immediate, abundant — spilling over her chin and down onto her breasts.

The room erupted.

People screamed. Someone yelled for an ambulance. Tammy from finance tried to grab the fork, and Clarissa whipped around so wildly Tammy caught a slice across her hand and shrieked backward.

Clarissa kept going.

The first section of wire snapped with a metallic ping. It recoiled into her cheek, pricked skin, snagged flesh, opened it wider. She moved to the other side, hands slick with spit and blood, jerking and sawing until that side caught too. The wire dragged through the inside of her mouth, carving thin ragged openings that widened every time she pulled. It ripped free from her bottom lip on the way out.

“Ahh—AHHH—”

By then her mouth felt peeled open. Loose. Wet. Full of salt and iron and stringy warm red. She could feel little flaps of torn flesh shifting every time she breathed.

When she was done, her mouth looked less like a mouth than ruined fabric — something delicate shredded, soaked through, and barely hanging together.

She didn’t care.

She had finally been freed.

She staggered back to the buffet.

With blood-slick hands she grabbed a buffalo wing and tore into it.

The broken ends of wire still lodged in her gums bent and scraped deeper as she chewed, scoring her open wounds, ticking against her teeth. She moaned anyway. Then she grabbed bacon-wrapped scallops by the fistful and stuffed them into her mouth.

Relief flooded her so fast she looked like a Victorian child freed from their confining corset..

She smiled — fishy, bacony, bloody.

She did not care that people were screaming. She did not care that Dan stood frozen, white as paper. She did not care that Linda from Sales projectile-vomited across half the billing team.

No.

Fuck all of them.

She looked over at Dan, eyes wet and shining, and held out a piece of Wagyu toward him like she was flirting, like she was offering communion, like this was somehow still seduction.

He stared at her in horror.

Clarissa smiled wider and bit into it herself.

You know why? She turned left.

“Oh, Look Dan! Scallop–oooh and there’s bacon on them!”

And nothing — nothing — matters more than bacon on fucking scallops when you’ve been starving.

The Suburbs

She lay there.

Listening to herself breathe.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The ceiling above her was the color of mother-of-pearl. The house was silent in the way houses in good neighborhoods were silent: carefully, expensively, as though even the walls knew better than to complain.

She turned her head to the left and studied the wallpaper. Once, it had been bright yellow, with little flowers placed strategically all over it. Now it had faded into a dull pastel, the color of old sunlight. She could feel the texture of the paper with her eyes.

She remembered the day they picked it out. It was the day she felt it: the first kick of what would become her daughter, Alice. Their first child. Their first house in the perfect neighborhood. The first time she realized she was not passing through this life anymore.

She was inside it.

She was staying.

She was stuck.

Before that time, she was young. She had the hopes and dreams of any vibrant, intelligent woman in her early twenties. She had ambitions. She wanted to travel. To see the world. To live in London. That was the plan.

Then she met him.

At the bar, while she was talking to her male colleagues. She was smoking a cigarette and laughing at something one of them had said when she caught, from the corner of her eye, the dark auburn of his hair against his pale skin.

She turned to him, half-smiling, and gave him a stare. He stood against the wall in the distance, watching her as if he had been waiting for her to notice him. When he smiled, she turned away and carried on.

He came over anyway and asked her name.

“Anette,” she said. “And you?”

“Nathaniel,” he said.

She smiled.

They talked. About their courses in college. About what they wanted to do. About politics and the future and all the places they swore they would see before the world could decide what shape their lives should take.

He wanted to see the world too. He wanted to make a home away from where he was. He wanted to keep moving. Never settling.

That was what he said.

They danced that night, and long into it, staring into each other’s eyes, feeling like they had known each other always. It was an instantaneous thing, you know?

She wasn’t sure what it was. It felt like love, the mad kind that makes you do mad things. From then on, they saw each other every single night. They hiked up to the mountain. They made love. They made dreams and ideas together. They rebelled against the ideals of what a life should be like.

That wasn’t for them.

They weren’t meant for the world they were in. They knew it. She loved him, and he loved her. Within six months of being together, they were married. They escaped and began making plans. They lived in a little apartment in the city. He took a job to make ends meet, and she worked at a diner.

They had everything planned out. They were going to get out of this place and see new things. They knew it. They had their money saved, and he had bought their plane tickets. They began to look at apartments in the south of London.

One night, celebrating the trip that was supposed to save them, they got too drunk, and Nathan took what she was not awake enough, clear enough, or willing enough to give.

It was spur of the moment.

That was what he called it later.

And then she got sick.

And then she was pregnant.

She told him she could end it, but he would have none of it. He could not cope with the idea of taking away the life of something, though he had not minded taking choice from her. He made her feel guilty for conceiving of the thought at all.

So the plan changed.

He quit his job and put his law degree to good use, working under a firm his father had worked for. When she started to show, she had to quit the diner. No one wanted a pregnant waitress serving them. Not with her swollen stomach pressing against her apron. Not with the proof of consequence moving visibly beneath her dress.

He took the money from the plane tickets, the trip, and his savings, and put a down payment on a house.

This perfect little house.

This perfect little neighborhood.

When she walked into it, she could hear the deafening silence. Her own voice echoed off the bare walls and came back to her changed. Smaller. When he looked at her, he smiled.

She smiled back weakly and held her stomach.

“We’ll take it,” he said.

There, in what would become their room, they placed the first sheet of bright yellow wallpaper. It was beautiful, she thought. So full of promise, she thought.

And then the kick.

And then Alice was born.

And then, two years after that, her little boy was born.

Now, seven years after the birth of Alice, she was a homemaker. The ideal trophy wife of the fifties. The kind of woman neighbors complimented because her curtains were clean and her children were quiet and her husband’s shirts were always pressed.

They never got to travel.

They never saw London.

They never did anything.

Nathan came home from work exhausted, sometimes drunk, sometimes smelling of another woman. Anette would be home, cooking, cleaning, fixing, waiting. Waiting for him to come home. Waiting for the children to come home. Waiting for the day she would wake up and realize all of this had been just a horrible dream.

But it wasn’t.

This was her reality. She was stuck in the life she never chose to live, the life she never wanted. The children she was forced to love. The husband she thought she loved. This house. This prison with clean windows and a trimmed lawn.

In time, the boredom became its own kind of illness. It sat in her bones. It moved with her from room to room. It watched her fold laundry, season meat, wipe crumbs from the table, smile at women she did not know how to befriend. She became very good at appearing alive.

So when she met Adam, it was like breathing air after years underwater.

Adam was the collegiate son of her next-door neighbor. He had graduated and decided he would stay awhile with his family before going off and traveling. When she and Nathan hosted a dinner with them, she got along with Adam right away. He had light gray eyes, the kind that felt as if they were looking right through you. His hair was dark brown. He was tall and slender. Beautiful.

And he wanted, and was going to have, everything she had ever wanted in her life.

They were kindred spirits. They shared ideas of never being caged, of never settling, of wanting more than this mundane life. And he saw that in her too. There, within her sunken eyes, lived a dull fire that had been burning for years. The ache. The yearning to be free.

He visited her frequently. At first, only in the polite ways men could visit married women in neighborhoods where every curtain had a watcher behind it. A book returned. A question for Nathan. A message from his mother. Then, slowly, the visits became theirs.

They spoke in the kitchen, in the sitting room, at the threshold of the back door. They spoke about cities and books and politics and trains leaving stations before dawn. They spoke as if speech itself were a country they could escape into.

One day, while she was cleaning, he came to visit her. He knocked on the door frantically. She opened it, and he barged in without saying anything. She closed the door, and as she turned, he grabbed her, pushed her against it, and kissed her fervently on the mouth.

That dull fire grew into beautiful, violent flames within her. It was something she had not felt. Something she had never felt.

There, against that door, he had her. As he kissed her, he pulled up her dress and pulled down his pants. Within an instant, he was inside of her. Within an instant, they were both gone. They were lit up like embers.

I love you, she felt his body say with every single movement. I love you, I love you, I love you.

I love you too, her body screamed. I love you too.

When Adam left, she continued on with her routine. Only now, she was happy. Genuinely happy.

And then her children came home.

And then her husband.

And then she realized that everything was still the same.

She was still there.

But for a few hours every day, she had Adam. They talked about the dreams and ambitions they had. They made love wherever they could, whenever the chance was given. They had so much passion for each other. They dreamed about the life they could have together. The life they would have had if she had not been married to Nathan. If she had been four years younger. If she had not believed in Nathan’s promises. If she had not been so drunk that night. If saying no had ever mattered as much as she had once believed it would.

For those few moments, she could escape with Adam to a place where life could have been better.

One day, as he grabbed her and made love to her, naked atop the counter, she heard the kitchen door slam open.

Nathan came home early.

He watched in disbelief for a moment. They were not even aware he was there. Everything felt slow and painful, like getting stabbed by a dull knife. He had come home early. He wanted to surprise her, but instead he got the surprise.

His mouth twisted. His face flushed. He walked quickly, almost robotically, over to them. He yanked Adam’s naked body off of her and began to beat him profusely. She screamed and begged for him to stop.

Nathan got off Adam and grabbed her face. He shoved it to the side, slapped her, then spit on her.

“You whore,” he said. “You fucking common whore.”

Adam slowly got up. Nathan went to beat him again, but she stopped him. She screamed at Adam to leave.

Adam grabbed his things and looked at her. At that moment, she realized he was not going to save her, and it was foolish of her to think he ever could. The embers faded inside both of them as he looked down and away from her. His love, his passion, had reached its limit.

He stormed out of the house and left her there.

Nathan turned to her and asked if that was what she liked.

She began to cry.

“Is that,” he said as he violently grabbed her, picked her up, and threw her onto the kitchen table, “what you like?”

She slid off and landed hard on the floor. He followed her down.

After that, the room became strange to her. The table leg. The cold tile. The red mouth of the roast pan left open on the counter. His voice above her, asking what she liked, what she wanted, what kind of woman she had become.

“I want to hurt you as much as you hurt me,” he said.

She sobbed until the sound no longer seemed to belong to her. From somewhere far inside herself, she found the words, “Please stop.”

He did not stop.

When he was done, she was on the floor like something dropped and forgotten. Her dress was torn. Her body hurt in places she could not yet name. She stared past him, past the kitchen, past the windows and the hedges and the perfect street outside.

She no longer moved.

She no longer cried.

The dull fire in her went out.

When the children came home, the house was clean. She was cooking dinner. Nathan was reading the paper. Everything was back to normal. She served the roast, and her husband kissed her on the cheek. Her children looked for her reaction, and she smiled weakly.

Adam left the next morning.

In the months that followed, everything was as it should be in the suburbs. The hedges were trimmed. The curtains were washed. The children went to school. The wives waved from porches. Men came home at six o’clock and carried the smell of the outside world into houses built to forgive them.

Everything was as it should be.

Except now, Anette felt nothing.

No sadness.

No anger.

Almost as if she had resigned.

This was the life she was living. This was the life she had to live.

And then one day, she felt it stir inside of her.

And she panicked.

She could not live in that house, in those rooms, in her body. She saw her life and who she was, and she saw that she had no family, no friends, no one but her children, whom she did not want. And she felt sorry, so very sorry, because they were beautiful and sweet and deserved the best.

She saw her husband, whom she had not wanted to marry, but who had taken from her on a drunken night, gotten her pregnant, and then called the consequences a family. He had forced her into this life. His cookie-cutter perfect life. The life she had never wanted.

She needed to get out.

She walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. Underneath the sink was the cupboard where she kept all her cleaning products. There, she had the arsenic she rubbed around parts of the house to prevent the mice from coming in.

She took it and went upstairs.

She went into their master bedroom and opened the bottle.

“This is strong stuff,” she said.

She pinched her nose and drank it in. She closed the bottle. She could taste it still in her mouth, so she sucked on Ludens to soften the taste. Then she threw herself back onto the bed.

The calm settled in.

She lay there.

Listening to herself breathe.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The ceiling above her was the color of mother-of-pearl.

She turned her head to the left and studied the wallpaper. Once, it had been bright yellow, with little flowers placed strategically all over it. Now it had faded into a dull pastel, the color of old sunlight. She could feel the texture of the paper with her eyes.

She turned her head back to the ceiling.

At first, there was only the pounding in her skull. Then her body began to betray the calm she had been promised. Her throat tightened. Her stomach clenched. She tried to turn onto her side, but her neck had gone stiff, and the room bent without moving.

Her body jerked.

Dying is painful, she thought.

The thought surprised her. She had imagined an ending like sleep. A soft closing. A quiet room. Instead, her body fought her with animal fury. It sweated. It shook. It emptied itself. It flushed red, then deepened toward purple, as if some ugly flower were blooming beneath her skin.

Then she felt it.

Not the poison.

Not the pain.

The wetness between her legs.

She started crying then, whispering little apologies in her mind. To Alice. To her son. To the life inside her. To the woman she had been before the house, before the wallpaper, before love became another word men used to mean possession.

Her body screamed as she trembled. She closed her eyes and clutched her protruding stomach.

As she went, she could still feel it.

Kick.

Kick.

Kick.

Lost, Grown in Space, and Found in the Thicket

i

I don’t know
if I ever said
let’s just be friends

or if I only meant
slow down,
stay near,
let me hear you
without losing myself.

It was never meant
to be an end

I Listened to U that night,
and something
wanted to make me lay
with you
for many other nIghts,

to explore our historieS,
hold your hand longer,
learn from one another,
and get back to that.

Oh, but time,
always the bastard,
will not adhere
to stopping,
rewinding, or slowing.

So it was up to me
to slow the pace.

I apologize for the miscommunication.

It was never meant to be an end,
but to see if we could hopefully have
a beginning.

ii

Seeds are planted apart
so that when they grow,
they are given the space
to flourish in abundance,
to appreciate their presence,
their space,
and what they’ve taken
to get to that point.

Some plants grow apart
and move to different pots,
see their former seedlings,
and admire them from a distance.

Others,
their roots entwine
and make a more formidable plant,
one that grows larger,
more enduring,
stronger
with time.

However it happens,
it begins
by giving the seeds
the space and grace
to grow.

To stretch toward the sun
sans apology.

To reach for the rain
without fear.

To be themselves truly,
outside the hands
that harmed them.

And after all that becoming,
if they find one another again—
let it be
because they chose to,

because they bloomed whole,
because love returned
with open hands.

If they do not,
let that be holy too.

Let each one grow
wild and full
in its own season,
unafraid to take up room,
unafraid to be seen.

May love find us, yes—

but only after
we have found ourselves.

Only after we have grown away
from all that tried
to keep us small.

Because every seed deserves a chance
to become
without being buried
by what could not love it.

iii

I put my hand
through the thicket,

struggling to find myself,
lost and afraid,

and found
the child in me
who was also lost
and afraid.

I felt her there,
small as a baby,

not knowing what happened
to all of me,

how suddenly
everything in me
went for broke.

And then his voice—
leering, looming rot
dressed as safety,

as truth:

“But you liked it, didn’t you?”

As if saying that
gave him consent
to do to my mind for years

what others did to my body without.

And he knew
what they did
to me

and still did it.

But somehow
worse.

He knew
how much I cared
about you.

How hurt I was.

He knew
the blood that
bound you both.

And still
he told me
you did not even want
to see me alive.

And I believed him.

Because of the silence,
because of the distance,
because your actions
spoke louder
than anything
I could not hear.

I believed him
when he told me
not to go
to the door.

I believed him
when he said,

Do not speak
out loud
He does not
want to see you

I trusted
the wrong mouth

because pain
had already made me
fluent
in being unwanted.

But one day,
through all
the other lies,

I wondered—

maybe he lied
about you too.

So I put my hand
back into
the thicket.

And before
I found myself,

I found you.

And I held on.

It was different
this time

because Time—
oh, TIme—

held still
for a moment.

Long enough
for me to see
a fog clear.

And there
we stood.

We always had been.

Through the years,
like you,

I may not have been
waiting,

but I have always
been here.

Not still.
Not frozen
Not kneeling
at the locked door.

Here.

Becoming.

Listening.

Learning the shape
of my own hand.

Seeing you become
whoever you were
meant to be,

respecting your space
as best as I knew how,

holding your silence,
your anger,
your pain,

even when I thought
I had caused it.

Maybe I should have
spoken better.

Maybe I should have
knocked harder.

Maybe I should have
torn the door down
and said,

What I really meant was—-

But I was listening
through wounds.

You were reacting
through yours.

The thicket had already
learned our voices
and spoke over us both.

It made your silence
sound like hatred.

It made my reaching
sound like accusation.

It made the thicket
look like a wall

when maybe
it was only
overgrown.

Maybe that was it.

We couldn’t hear
each other

through all that pain.

And I am sorry
for that.

Because I swear
I hear you better
as time passes.

Not from distance.
but because

the pain
is less loud

so as to
allow for
your music.

I do not know
if we have become
better at
listening,

but now
I can “listen
to hear
where you are”.

I have always
wanted to.

And if you come back,
do not come back
disguised by the fog.

Come back
by what reflects
within you

Because after learning
what reflects
in me
for you,

I found myself
in the thicket too.

Evy Gonzalez Ronceria

72 Hours

This was the first time Agatha was alone with Phineas.

She stood over him for a moment without touching him, wanting to savor the private strangeness of finally having him to herself. He seemed even more beautiful in silence. Without conversation, without interruption, without the clumsy obligations of ordinary life pressing in on either side of them, there was something almost sacred in being able to look at him as long as she pleased.

Agatha let herself look.

His mouth was slightly open, as if he had just been about to say something. One arm rested beside him at an angle that felt careless, unguarded. He looked like a man caught in pause rather than stillness, as though at any second he might turn his head, find her watching him, and let the corner of his mouth lift in that quiet way she had imagined a hundred times before.

But he didn’t.

That emboldened her.

She stepped closer, her pulse beating harder now, and reached for his hand. She touched him lightly at first, giving him the chance to resist, to pull away, to ruin the fantasy before it had even begun.

He didn’t.

Agatha smiled and drew his fingers against her thigh.

The gesture sent heat rolling through her so quickly she nearly laughed. All this time she had wondered what kind of man he would be—whether he would be hesitant, proud, cruel, gentle. Now she thought perhaps she had known all along. He had the kind of face that made a woman want to confess things. The kind of body that suggested a hidden severity. A restraint. As though whatever he wanted, he wanted it deeply enough not to waste language on it.

She leaned down and kissed him.

It was meant to be a test. A soft one. Just enough to wake the moment between them and see whether it lived.

His lips gave beneath hers with an ease that made her breath catch.

Agatha kissed him again, longer this time, and when his hand slipped from where she had placed it, brushing lower against her leg, she shivered. She caught his wrist and guided him back up, this time higher, pressing his palm where she wanted to be touched.

There, she thought.

There you are.

Her body answered before her mind could. She felt herself soften, open, begin. It had been building toward this for longer than she cared to admit. In glances. In imaginings. In the private violence of wanting something she had never once asked for aloud. She had made a whole world out of almost nothing: the shape of his mouth, the breadth of his shoulders, the possibility of his looking at her and seeing not the woman everyone knew, but the woman who lived beneath her skin. The ravenous one. The lonely one. The one who wanted to be chosen so thoroughly it bordered on annihilation.

Now here he was beneath her hands, and if he would not choose her in words, then perhaps he was choosing her this way.

Agatha lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed each finger slowly. She let her lips linger over the knuckles, the tips, the spaces between them, and when she looked back at him she felt a tightening low in her belly so sharp it almost frightened her. She wanted to make him react. Wanted proof that he was as full of hunger as she was. Wanted to drag something visible from him and know she had done it.

Instead, he stayed beautifully quiet.

That too she mistook for depth.

She moved closer and let her hand travel over him with more confidence now, tracing the planes of him, feeling him yield to her touch in a way that made her bolder. She kissed his neck. His chest. Pressed herself against him as though the nearness alone might bring him fully into the moment. She imagined his restraint thinning by degrees, his body giving itself over piece by piece, his silence not empty but loaded. She had known men who made noise too soon, men who rushed to prove themselves with clumsy enthusiasm. Phineas, she thought, was not like that. Phineas felt like a held breath. Like something dark and concentrated.

Agatha wanted to be the one to break him open.

When she shifted against him, his arm slid and dragged along her side, and the accidental intimacy of it sent a tremor through her. She took hold of him again, more urgently this time, arranging him where she wanted him, telling herself she was only helping him say yes in the language he preferred. Her own breathing had begun to fill the room now. She could hear it—thin at first, then rougher, catching in the back of her throat.

“You wanted this,” she whispered.

Whether she meant him or herself, she did not know.

The sentence dissolved between them.

Agatha kissed him harder, and because he did not interrupt her, because he did not break the spell by speaking or pulling away or revealing himself to be smaller than what she had imagined, desire became something denser than desire. It became permission. It became its own proof. In his quiet she found room for every dangerous invention. She could give him any thought she wanted. Any motive. Any ache. He received all of it without contradiction.

Her hand moved lower. Then lower still.

She felt a wild little thrill at the weight of him, at the pliancy of him beneath her handling, at the way everything in the room seemed to narrow around the place where her body ended and his began. The world outside them had gone irrelevant. There was only the pressure of touch, the sound of her own blood, the mounting heat of being able to take what had so long been unavailable.

She climbed over him slowly, as if crossing into something irreversible.

The air touched more of her now. She did not care. She was beyond embarrassment, beyond caution. Whatever version of herself might once have hesitated had already receded. In its place was a woman moving by instinct alone, by need, by the long-denied pleasure of no longer being denied.

She bent over him and kissed him again, deeper than before, one hand braced beside his head, the other guiding him, fitting him, making the moment become what she required it to be. Her hair slipped around them like a curtain. Her mouth opened over his. Her body moved with growing certainty. She pressed herself down and gasped at the force of feeling that rose through her. It was not tenderness now. Not really. It was something stranger and more consuming than tenderness. Something devotional in shape and feral in practice.

In her mind, he met her there.

In her mind, his stillness was effort—the effort not to lose control too soon.

In her mind, his silence was concentration.

In her mind, every slip of his body beneath hers was an answer.

Agatha rocked harder against him, each motion feeding the next, until she could no longer tell whether she was chasing pleasure or trying to bury herself in it. Her hands gripped him wherever they could. Her mouth found his throat again, then his chest, then his mouth. She wanted to overwhelm him. Wanted to be overwhelming. Wanted to feel him overtaken by her, undone by her, wanted so badly that the wanting itself began to feel holy.

The pressure built inside her in hot, merciless waves.

She clutched at him. Guided his hands where she wanted them. Pressed his palms against her body and held them there, dizzy with the luxury of being able to make everything obey the shape of her need. She moved faster. Harder. The sound that escaped her then was raw enough to startle her, but once it was out she could not call it back. More followed—small, broken sounds, then louder ones, stripped of dignity, stripped of thought.

Phineas stayed beneath her, inscrutable and open.

Agatha mistook that openness for surrender.

The room lost its edges. The air thickened. Time unraveled. There was only the insistence of her body, the unbearable closeness of climax, the vast interior thunder of wanting finally given permission to finish itself. She bowed over him with a cry, every muscle seizing, every part of her drawing tight around the force of release. She rode it all the way through, trembling so hard she thought she might split apart under it.

For a few suspended seconds afterward, she remained draped over him, breathing in ragged bursts, eyes closed, unwilling to reenter the world just yet. Her forehead nearly touched his chest. One hand still pinned his wrist where she had placed it. The other shook against him, too weak to hold itself up.

Then she opened her eyes.

At first she did not understand what had changed.

The room was too quiet.

Not intimate quiet. Not the breathless quiet after pleasure.

A larger quiet than that.

Agatha lifted her head slowly.

The light above her buzzed.

A hard white glare fell over the room and flattened everything beneath it. What a moment ago had felt private now looked exposed. Sharpened. Wrong.

Her gaze dropped to the hand she was still holding against her breast.

Very carefully, as though the motion itself might alter reality, she lifted her fingers away one by one.

His hand slid down and fell with a dull, loose weight against her body.

Agatha froze.

“No,” she whispered.

The word came out before thought.

She stared at him.

His eyes were open, but not with desire, not with daze, not with anything. They were simply open. His mouth, which she had been kissing as though it concealed some terrible softness, hung slightly parted in the same unchanging shape. There was no tension in him, no withheld breath, no aftermath. Only arrangement. Only the awful fact that every answer she had felt from him had come from her.

Agatha jerked backward so fast her knee slipped. She hit the floor hard, the impact jolting through her spine, but she barely felt it. Her gaze flew around the room, seeing it now as if a veil had ripped.

Steel.

Tile.

A drain in the floor.

A tray of instruments overturned nearby.

The wall of drawers.

The antiseptic sting in the air.

The table.

The table.

Above her, Phineas lay sprawled on a metal autopsy slab.

Agatha’s face emptied.

Then horror moved in.

Not the abstract kind. Not the delicate kind. Total, bodily horror. The kind that enters through every opening at once.

She looked back at him and this time she saw what had been there all along and what she had refused to name: the weight of limbs that had not resisted because they could not, the passivity she had romanticized into restraint, the yielding she had called consent, the silence she had filled with longing because the alternative was unthinkable.

A sound tore out of her, half gasp and half moan, except now there was no pleasure in it at all.

“No,” she said again, shaking her head violently. “No, no, no.”

But the room had already become itself.

She could smell it now beneath everything else—the cleaned-over nearness of death. She could see the instruments clearly. The suturing materials. The discarded gloves. The chart she had read earlier. She saw his body not as a man withholding himself but as what it was: a body on a slab, a body entrusted to procedure, a body opened to examination, a body that had already belonged to death before she ever touched it.

Her stomach turned with brutal force.

Agatha lurched to one side and vomited onto the tile.

The convulsions wrung through her again and again until her eyes watered and her throat burned. She knelt there, naked and shaking, one hand braced against the floor, strings of saliva hanging from her mouth, while above her the fluorescent light buzzed on as if nothing at all had happened.

Then she looked at Phineas and fury came.

It came because shame alone was too much to bear.

“Fuck you,” she screamed.

Her voice ricocheted off the steel drawers.

“Fuck you for this.”

She snatched the tray nearest her and hurled it. Instruments crashed and scattered. She stumbled to her feet and struck the drawers with the flat of her hand, then again, harder, then with both fists. The pain barely registered. She wanted noise. She wanted destruction. She wanted something outside herself to hold the ugliness of what had happened.

“I’m not sick,” she shouted, wild-eyed, hoarse. “I’m not sick.”

The words sounded unconvincing even to her.

She hit the drawers again.

This is your fault, she thought, because some part of her still needed someone else to be guilty first.

But even as the thought formed, another one came beneath it, colder and cleaner:

He did nothing.

He had done nothing.

He had not chosen. Had not yielded. Had not wanted. Had not asked. Every bit of life she had poured into him had been hers alone—hers to invent, hers to mistake, hers to force.

Agatha sagged.

The rage burned out almost as suddenly as it had arrived. In its wake came shaking. Then sobbing. Then the thin mechanical scrape of her own breath trying to steady itself enough to survive the next minute.

She stood there a long time, arms wrapped around herself, staring at the body on the slab.

At last the part of her that had built a career where other people would have collapsed came forward.

Training.

Discipline.

Procedure.

She bent and collected her clothes. She dressed with stiff, jerking movements, then stopped, stripped again, and crossed to the hose. She cleaned herself with a frantic precision that bordered on violence, as if she could wash not only the fluids from her skin but the event itself from time. She dried off. Dressed again. Tied her hair back with trembling hands.

Then she got to work.

First the floor.

Then the walls.

Then the tray.

Then the instruments.

She cleaned until the room no longer looked interrupted by human emotion. Cleaned until the air stung with disinfectant. Cleaned until the panic had to make room for focus.

Only then did she return to Phineas.

With gloved hands and a face carefully brought back under control, Agatha resumed his autopsy.

She was methodical now. Exact. There was no trace of frenzy in her movements, no softness, no lingering. The woman who had climbed over him in a fever of self-made intimacy was gone. In her place stood Dr. Agatha Vale, pathologist, meticulous, respected, one of the finest in her department. She opened him the way she had opened so many others. She examined what required examining. She documented what required documenting. She moved with the calm of practice, with the merciless mercy of expertise.

When she finished, she sutured him closed.

She washed him.

She arranged him.

Then she slid his body back into a drawer and shut the metal door.

The click was soft.

Almost polite.

Agatha stood there staring at it for a moment, one gloved hand still resting against the handle.

“Goodbye, Phineas,” she said.

Her voice was steady again.

She stripped off her gloves, switched off the overhead light, and stepped into the hallway.

The elevator took only seconds to arrive. Inside, she watched her reflection in the brushed metal doors and fixed it piece by piece: the looseness around her mouth, the redness in her eyes, the suggestion of ruin. By the time the doors opened onto the main floor, she looked like herself again—or close enough.

She crossed the hospital lobby with measured ease.

A resident nodded to her. She nodded back.

Two nurses near reception were laughing at something on a phone. One of them glanced up, smiled politely, and went back to the conversation. The ordinariness of it all nearly undid her. How obscene that the world should continue moving in straight lines while she still felt split open down the center.

Outside, evening had settled in cleanly. The air was cooler now. Cars passed in dull streams beneath the streetlights. Somewhere, far off, a siren rose and faded.

Agatha got into her car and shut the door.

For a while she sat without moving, both hands gripping the steering wheel.

Nothing happened, she told herself.

Nothing that matters.

Nothing that can be proven.

The thought steadied her.

She inhaled. Exhaled. Started the engine.

By tomorrow, she thought, the memory would already begin to flatten. By next week it might feel dreamlike. By next month she would have folded it away so deeply inside herself it would return only in fragments—an image, a taste, a sound. That was how survival worked. Not through innocence, but through compartment.

She pulled out of the hospital lot and drove into the night.

What Agatha did not know—what all her years in medical school, all her training, all her hours in the morgue, and all the private hungers she had so carefully kept hidden had somehow failed to teach her—was this:

It takes roughly seventy-two hours for sperm to die inside a dead man’s body.