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.

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.

You Need Someone

I have been trying to write an essay for a friend.

That sentence should not carry this much weight, and yet it does.

It is a simple essay. The kind of thing sixteen-year-old me could have written in an afternoon, maybe while half-distracted, maybe while listening to music, maybe while doing three other things at once. Back then, words came when I called them. They lined up. They obeyed. They arrived with a kind of loyalty I never had to question.

Now I am nearly finished with this favor, and still it has felt like dragging something holy through mud.

For the past few weeks, I have been telling my brother that I have been struggling with it. Not because the essay itself is impossible, but because I have been overwhelming myself, tangling the task until it feels bigger than it is. Then he sent me one of those harmless little links people send without thinking much of it, something about the birth months that supposedly produce the best writers. June. November. February. Another month I cannot remember. Not May.

I was born in May.

It is almost embarrassing to admit how deeply that stupid detail cut me. It was such a small thing. Such a silly thing. A joke, really. But something in me gave way. It became the cherry on top of a magnificently horrible Sunday. Because it was never really about the list. It was about what the list touched.

It touched the bruise.

It touched the fact that I used to be the person people came to when they needed help writing. The person who edited essays, wrote essays, sometimes got paid to write essays. The person who could write stories at the drop of a dime. The person who could look at someone and make a poem out of them. The person who had language on speed dial.

And now here I was, unable to finish one simple thing.

That is when the joke turned on me.

I texted my brother something playful, something like good for you and Mom, the best writers in the house, because he is November and my mother is February. I was trying to keep it light. But beneath the text, beneath the laugh, something uglier was already waking up. The voice that waits for moments like that. The one that loves a crack in the door.

Guess who is not the best writer. Guess who cannot finish a damn essay. Guess who cannot finish writing their book. Guess who cannot finish a poem. Guess who cannot seem to do any of the things that once came so naturally. Guess who cannot make the art, cannot crochet, cannot sing, cannot pull the thing from the soul and bring it into the world.

It kept going.

Cruelty always knows how to build momentum.

And beneath all of that, the real question began to rise, the one that frightens me most:

Where are you?

Where is the woman who could make things happen? Where is the one with force in their spirit? The one who could create, heal, move, speak, write, become? Where is that version of me that felt not invincible, but deeply, undeniably alive?

Because I know they are still in there.

That is what makes it hurt the way it does. If they were gone, maybe this would be grief with a clean edge. But they are not gone. They feel buried. Locked somewhere inside me, behind fear, behind exhaustion, behind the strange paralysis that trauma leaves in the body long after the danger has passed. Or maybe after some dangers have not quite passed at all.

The truth is that this does not begin and end with writing.

It only looked like writing because that was where the wound surfaced.

For the last few years, and especially these past months, I have felt deeply stuck. Not in the romantic way people talk about being blocked. Not in the neat, temporary way creative droughts are often described. I mean stuck in a way that feels physical, painful, almost surreal. As if the words exist, but snag somewhere between thought and form. As if I can feel them pressing against me from the inside, asking to be let out, and still I cannot free them.

And that kind of stuckness begins to infect everything.

I have been dealing with the weight of CPTSD, for the past few months, with fear that has learned how to make a home in the body. I have been trying to progress while feeling unsafe. Trying to move while feeling watched. Trying to build while still carrying the psychic architecture of being manipulated, frightened, and worn down. There are things that happened to me that made me disconnect from myself for survival, and now survival is no longer enough. Now I want my life back, and I am realizing how difficult it is to return to yourself after you have spent so long being taught to abandon yourself.

That is the terror of it, I think.

Not blood. Not ghosts. Not monsters.

To stand at the threshold of your own life and not fully know how to enter it.

To remember yourself in flashes but not in permanence.

To know the voice is yours and still struggle to speak in it.

The cruelest part is that the things I love most begin to feel like proof of failure when I cannot access them. Writing. Art. Healing. Learning. Teaching. All the things that once made me feel most like myself become tender to the touch, almost threatened, as if losing access to them means losing access to me.

And I do not want that.

I do not want a life where I am severed from my own passions. I do not want to be so afraid, so exhausted, so destabilized that I cannot reach the parts of myself that make living feel meaningful. I want to be awake. Entirely present. I want to do my work well. I want to create without terror sitting beside me. I want to flourish, not merely recover. I want to know who I am outside of fear, outside of projection, outside of survival. I want to know what is truly mine.

Recently, in the middle of an argument with someone I care about, he said something that lodged itself in me: You need someone.

And I remember the immediate offense that rose in my body, because the answer came just as quickly, sharp and certain as a struck match:

No.

I do not need someone.

I need me.

That was the truth sitting beneath all of this grief.

I need me. I didn’t say it out loud, and parts of me felt I should have, but not for him, for me. I need my voice. I need my safety. I need my center of gravity returned to me. I need the self I have been grieving while still carrying them. I need to feel that I belong to myself again. Not to fear. Not to confusion. Not to the aftermath of what other people did to my mind. Me.

Because I do love myself. Fiercely, even now. Enough to know when I have gone missing. Enough to feel the rage of that absence. Enough to keep searching through the dark for the shape of my own hand.

And I think that when I find myself again, I will not only be able to hold myself better, I will be able to stand inside the kind of love that can meet me there. Love that is reciprocal. Safe. Mutual. Love that does not ask me to abandon myself in order to keep it. Love that does not leave me starving and call it devotion. Because I think finding myself also means knowing I am finally well enough to receive what answers me back. Not a love that says I need someone, but a love that recognizes I am the someone, and meets me there whole.

That is what this is, maybe.

Not failure.

Not the death of talent.

Not proof that I have lost whatever gift once lived in me.

Maybe it is the sound of me reaching for myself again, clumsily, angrily, honestly. Maybe it is ugly because return is ugly. Maybe it shakes because I am still shaking. Maybe it comes out in fragments because fragments are what I have had to work with.

But buried is not gone.

Silenced is not emptied.

Blocked is not barren.

They are still here.

A little frightened. A little fractured. A little harder to find than they once were. But here.

And if I need anyone now, it is not another savior, not another witness, not another pair of hands telling me who I am.

It is me.

It has always been me.

Reminder

My body felt grief

but could not remember

how to express

the crippling pain it was feeling.

So I asked guatquyca

in silent words

in the vibrations of my temple.

My aches filled the air.

The sky turned dark,

Broken.

It bore a tempestuous song.

There

they reminded me

and I sang with them.

Little One

During breathwork today, I was told to imagine myself fighting the darkness.

Not hunting it.
Not destroying it.

But forcing it into the light.

I resisted at first.

For years, I have believed the darkness was my refuge.

In meditation, in dreams, since childhood — I have seen a cave.

The soil inside it is black-brown and soft, almost sandy. Clean. Cool.
When I face outward, there is an ocean. Cold. Comforting. Endless.

The cave sits along a beach.

I always believed it was a place to heal.
A place to regenerate.
A place to gather myself before returning to the world.

Because the world is heavy.

Because carrying ancestral memory is heavy.

Because being the child of parents who were never truly there is heavy.

Because loving people who do not know how to love back is heavy.

So I would go into the cave. Into the dark. To prepare myself to go back out.

But today was different.

Today, I was told to bring light into the cave.

When I stepped deeper inside, I saw her.

A child.

At first, I thought she was a little girl I once worked with — the same messy haircut, the same anxious energy. But when I knelt down, I realized she was me.

She was pulling at my heart.

Clawing it.

Squeezing it so tightly I could barely breathe.

She was not trying to hurt me. She was desperate.

She needed me to understand.

She is terrified of being too much.
Terrified of losing people.
Terrified that her need for affection makes her unlovable.

She thinks she ruins things.
She thinks if she wants too much, everyone will leave.

She has spent her whole life begging to be seen — first by narcissistic parents who were never fully present, and then by lovers and friends who mirror that absence in different forms.

Not always cruel.

Sometimes avoidant.
Sometimes “kind,” but distant.
Sometimes people who take and take, and then call her the user for wanting reciprocity.

And the child believes it.

She thinks she is the problem.

She pulls at my heart because she wants someone to finally say:

“I see you. You are not too much.”

So I sat down in the cave.

I took her hand off my heart.

I placed her on my lap and turned her toward the ocean.

I pressed the heart back into her chest.

“Your heart is my heart,” I told her.
“You are safe. You are loved. You do not have to prove anything anymore.”

“You do not have to scream to be heard.”

“You do not have to bleed to be chosen.”

“You do not have to give endlessly to deserve warmth.”

And something shifted.

She stopped crying.

For the first time in what feels like lifetimes — she calmed. Her tears stopped. 

I cradled and hummed with the little one in my arms.

Here is what I understood in that cave:

I have been returning to the darkness not just to heal —
but to recharge so I could go back out and give again.

To people who do not show up the way I show up.

To people who accept devotion but resist intimacy.

To people who project their shame onto me and call it my flaw.

To people who say I am “using” them because I ask for care in return.

That cycle ends here.

Kindness is not a debt.

Generosity is not an invitation for extraction.

Reciprocity is not selfish.

If you continuously show me that you do not value me, I will believe you.

Not because I am worthless.

But because I am finally listening.

I deserve respect.
I deserve tenderness.
I deserve to receive the same presence I offer.

And the little girl in the cave deserves to stop begging.

This is not vengeance.

This is not hardness.

This is light entering the cave.

If this calls you out — good.

If this holds you — good.

If this makes you uncomfortable — sit with it.

But I will not go back into the darkness to prepare myself for more depletion.

I will go into the cave to rest.

And when I step back into the ocean air, I will step out whole.

Not hungry.

A Way - Part Two

“You know I could walk up by my damn self,” Moira snapped, ripping her wrist from Ben’s sweaty grip.

Ben hadn’t even realized he’d been dragging her—from the gym, to the street, up the stairs, breathless and frantic.

“Huh—oh, sorry, Moira, I’m just—when you see it, her, you’ll—”

They stopped short at his door.

Moira planted her palm flat against his chest, holding him there.
“Her?” she demanded. “Wait. I’m meeting someone? You’ve been a wreck for months, Benjamin, and now there’s a her? What the fuck?”

Tears pooled in her eyes, sharp and sudden.

“I don’t need to meet whoever she is,” Moira continued, her voice breaking, “at least not yet. In case you’ve forgotten, she was practically my sister. My family. When I lost everyone, she was there. And—”

“Hey,” a voice said gently from inside the apartment. “What’s going on? I heard voices.”

Angie stood there.

Just as Moira remembered her.
Living. Breathing.

A sound tore its way out of Moira’s chest as her eyes widened and her hand tightened in the fabric of Ben’s jacket. Ben covered Moira’s hand with his own, felt the violent tremor in her fingers, hoped—stupidly—that touch could anchor this moment.

“Moi—”

“Shut up,” Moira whispered. “Shut. Up.”

Tears slid down her face as she slowly let go of Ben. She tilted her head, wonder and disbelief softening her features, her shoulders sagging as if her body wanted to collapse—but didn’t. Bearing witness mattered more than fainting.

“How are…” she tried. Swallowed. “How are you here?”

Angie’s eyes filled as she shrugged helplessly, a small, broken smile tugging at her mouth.
“Honestly? I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe the wedding was a promise. Or a wish. I—I don’t know.”

Moira laughed through her tears and wiped her face.
“A wish,” she echoed. “It was a wish.”

She hugged Angie.

Then Ben did.

For a moment, it was the happiest thing any of them had ever known—the relief of Angie being back, alive, here.

Until Ben’s arms closed around Moira.

“What—no,” Moira gasped, shoving him away. “No. No no no no no.”

Ben’s heart slammed into his throat.

Angie was gone.

Ben stood there, everything still. Even the dust in the air seemed to hold her outline — a shape where she had been.

He looked at Moira.

Her arms were tight at her sides, fingers twitching outward — the same nervous reach she used to make when she’d grab for Angie’s hand in crowded rooms.

Ben kept staring, like his body hadn’t received the message yet.

Then he moved.

“Angie?”

He checked the hallway first, then the bathroom, then the bedroom — opening doors as if she might be standing politely behind one, waiting for the right cue to return.

“Angie, stop. This isn’t—”

“Ben.”

Moira’s shoulders dropped. She stepped into the middle of the living room.

The apartment did not feel empty.

It felt… plucked. Rearranged. Nothing missing. Just shifted.

“She just disappeared,” Ben said, breathing uneven. “We have to find her.”

Moira lifted her hand.

“Hold on.”

“For what?”

“Shhh.”

“You saw her. She was here.”

“I know.”

“And she’s gone.”

“No.”

“What do you mean no?!”

Moira’s jaw tightened.

“Because it can’t be that you saw her all night and I only got her for a few minutes in the morning. Because Benjamin — you may have been her husband — but I am her sister.”

Her voice didn’t rise. It steadied.

“I felt it when she left the first time. I felt it in my ribs. And I’m telling you right now — she is not gone like that.”

Ben swallowed.

Moira took one step closer.

“You think because you two were special bone buddies that makes you more important than me?” she said, deadpan. “Moira equals Bestie for Life. Always.”

Ben blinked.

Then laughed — sharp and startled.

She hit his arm.

He pulled her into a hug. They laughed harder than the moment deserved. Then quieter. Then still. Moira’s head rested on his shoulder. “Where are you here, Ange?” she whispered to the room. “Why leave here  like that? You wouldn’t just go—right? Not with me. Not just like that.”Ben pressed his cheek into her hair. “Like you said,” he murmured. “You feel her. You’ll tell me the day she’s gone again.” Moira nodded once. “A promise.”

That night, Ben woke into paralysis.

He couldn’t move.

The air felt thick, pressing down on his chest.

There was weight at the edge of the mattress.

Tall.

Still.

Watching him.

His throat worked uselessly.

The figure leaned forward.

Hair falling over its face.

And then—

“Oh my god, you should see your face!”

Angie burst into laughter.

The pressure vanished.

Ben jerked upright.

“What the hell, Ange?”

“I have always wanted to scare you like that,” she said, wiping imaginary tears from her eyes. “And I thought this was the best opportunity.”

“You’re dead.”

“And you still scare easy!”

“No, I meant — you’re dead!”

She laughed again, and he lunged for her. She darted away, the room bending strangely around them as if the walls were slightly tilted.

He caught her by the waist and pulled her in.

He buried his face in her hair.. It still smelled like her raspberry cowash.

“Tell me this is real,” he whispered. “Tell me I’m not just dreaming.”

She leaned back slightly and looked at him.

“What I’ve learned so far,” she said gently, “is that two things can be true.”

She placed her hands on his face.

“This is real.”

The clock behind her began to soften at the edges.

“And you are dreaming.”

Ben looked around.

The walls breathed.

The bed stretched slightly too long.

The digital clock melted — numbers fixed at 9:08.

“Why did you leave?”

A small pause.

“I think we misjudged it,” she said. “We don’t always get the whole morning.”

“What happens now?”

She wrapped her arms around him, resting her chin against his chest.

“For now,” she whispered, “we have this.”

“And after?”

“There are ways,” she said softly. “Not all of them look like this.”

“How will I know—”

She stopped him with a kiss.

“Ask Moira.”

She leaned close to his ear.

“And you forgot to turn on your alar—”

Ben woke with a choking gasp.

The room was still.

The microwave clock glowed through the doorway.

9:09 a.m.

He grabbed his phone.

9:09.

His mind snagged on the dream.

9:08.

The number would not let go.

His phone rang.

Moira.

He answered.

There was a long breath on the other end.

“Ben,” she said quietly. “What time was she buried?”

His stomach dropped.

“Nine-oh-eight.”

Silence.

On both ends.

“That’s the hour,” Moira said.

Neither of them said what it meant.

Empieza

Write because you will yourself to.

Write because you make magic and pierce with your words.

Write because this is your strength and your beauty.

This is where you possess your power.

Make.

Your hands can still make

what they have always made.

The lines you carve into paper

shake and tremble—

forming images that tell

stories of life and death and pain,

singing of present and past and unknowns,

of things we cannot reach

but ache to touch.

An inner melody.

Canta.

Porque esa fue la voz

con la que gritaste al revivir

una y otra vez.

Con la que lloras y ríes

y cuentas historias.

Canta por la raíz que te sostiene.

Canta por lo más bonito de tu gente,

de tus ancestros—

la línea que nos conecta

de aquí

al allá.

En esa voz

están tus palabras,

tu don.

En ellas están las semillas,

donde brotan las flores—

las amorosas,

las brillantes,

las brutales.

Las que desmantelarán

todas las impurezas,

todo lo maligno,

toda la vileza.

La mano negra que pesa sobre esta tierra—

la agarraré con mis obras

y romperé cada dedo.

Traeré la luz.

La paz.

Sanaré a la madre.

A mí.

A todo lo que amo tanto.

Pero primero—

Write.

So that this may begin

to end.

To begin,

Empieza.

"We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve."

TW: trauma

I first read The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a teenager, around the same time my own memories of a traumatic youth began to surface—alongside my reconnection to my Indigenous roots. The book resonated deeply with me then, but what I couldn’t have known was how that one line would echo through my life years later.

No matter how much I have learned—through therapy, through reconnection, through family history and hard-earned growth—I still found myself accepting the love I thought I deserved.

Some traumas run deeper than the individual. They are ancestral. Societal. Cultural. I see them reflected in our television shows. I see them in my mother. I see them in my cousins. I hear them in the stories told about the women in my family. And even when I am actively trying to understand, to move forward, I find myself repeating the same mistakes.

“We keep going toward pieces of shit,” my brother once said. “We see the danger, but somehow we convince ourselves that that is the relationship worth salvaging.”

We are conditioned to be hostages to danger. Taught for centuries that we must protect hostile environments—and the people who thrive within them. So when something feels safe, when it feels calm or nurturing, we don’t fight for it.  We don’t work through it. We don’t trust it. Because deep down, we don’t believe we deserve that peace.

We think we deserve the chaos.

The cruel irony is that healing makes this harder to spot at first, especially with people who are good at hiding their faces.We don’t immediately recognize that we’re still following the same patterns—we just think we’re doing better. It takes time. We convince ourselves we’re choosing differently now.

But our bodies remember what our minds try to forget.

The signs start to appear. The same red flags we once ignored. The same tightness in the stomach. The same unease. And suddenly, our body is signaling what our mind hasn’t fully accepted yet: this is harm. And if we are going to truly heal, we must stay present. Alert. Awake.

And then it happens.

The realization lands. The trigger is pulled. Your world collapses. Everything you worked years to build feels like it’s turned to ash. Your body and mind revolt at once, and the old script starts playing:

You deserve this.

No.

You knew this time. You saw the danger. You asked the questions. You set boundaries. You listened to your intuition instead of silencing it. You sought the truth and recognized it for what it was—and you pushed it away.

You didn’t do anything wrong.

You were manipulated. Groomed. Your care was used for someone else’s benefit. And when you are still surrounded by trauma, when escape isn’t simple or immediate, it can be nearly impossible to see that you are trying to “salvage shit” instead of nurturing something that was actually safe.

I blamed myself over and over again. My fault, my fault.

But as I slowly reconnected—communicating again with the person at the center of an old misunderstanding—I felt something unexpected: ease. Safety. Familiar comfort. The feeling I have in my closest friends, my chosen family. The feeling that doesn’t require me to shrink or bleed to earn it.

That quiet sense of home.

That was what I deserved all along.

The feeling I lost through poor communication. Through blurred boundaries. Through things left unsaid. Safety. The safety that could exist when two people are willing to listen—because once upon a time, we really did.

In everything and everyone who gave me safety, there was a sense of home. And I hope—truly—that they felt it too. Because that is the kind of love we all deserve.

I accept the love I deserve.

A Way (Part One)

“It’s our anniversary,” Angie murmured as her eyes fluttered open, fixing on the brick archway above her. Her voice echoed softly through the dim space. For a moment, reflex took over—she reached for her neck, grasping quickly, hoping this was only some wild dream.

But the world sharpened instead.

The smell of damp stone and dust.
The cold, unmoving air.
The gentle weight of a chain resting against her collarbone.

And on that chain—

“…the ring.”

She pressed the metal between her thumb and index finger, as if it were something she could still warm by holding.

Angie pushed herself upright and leaned back against the wall, taking in the St. Patrick Basilica catacombs. The place was still beautiful—quiet, reverent, heavy with endings. Every year, she returned to this exact spot. The place where she and Ben had met during a candlelight tour.

A strange place to fall in love.
Stranger still to return to after death.

This was where their love learned how to live.

Her ending happened elsewhere.

But beginnings imprint deeper.

That was why she came back here.

Angie died seven years ago—only three years after meeting Ben. And though death took her body, it didn’t erase the life they built together. They loved each other fiercely, absurdly, as if the universe had made a clerical error and let two halves of the same soul collide too soon.

They met right here, between two cardinals’ tombs, the moment Angie’s shoe betrayed her. The Velcro gave out, and she went flying—face-first—into Ben’s Old Navy blue-label sweater.

“Can you walk?” he asked, annoyed and startled.

“Apparently… no.” She lifted her ankle, showing him the dangling shoe. She tried a hop. “See? Tore up from the—well, not the floor up, but close enough.”

Ben smiled despite himself. His warm brown eyes met her storm-grey ones—and her eyes smiled back at him. Fully. Kindly. A softness he didn’t know eyes were capable of.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m being a dick.”

“Thank you for apologizing,” she replied. “Are you having a bad day?”

“Think I’ve had a few,” he laughed weakly.

“Do you want to talk about it? It’s okay if you don’t—we don’t even know each oth—”

“Would you like to know me?”

She paused. Then smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “Actually… do you want to get coffee?”

That coffee became the first of many.
Hands found each other.
Lives unfolded.

Angie and Ben were in love long before either of them admitted it. They made plans easily, carelessly, believing time would behave itself.

For a while, it did.

Plans for the wedding came together smoothly. The reception plans followed. The years they spent together blurred into a continuous warmth—bright, consuming, deeply ordinary in the way real love often is. They argued sometimes. Small fractures. But they never lost sight of one another. Every day still carried the same spark that had drawn them together in the catacombs.

People like to say the honeymoon phase fades. That it’s just a trick of novelty.

But not for them.

For Angie and Ben, love felt like a long, unbroken thought—something luminous, stretching forward without a visible end.

Ben planned the surprise carefully. Angie had always wanted the small patch of grass near the pier—the place where they’d shared their first kiss—for their wedding reception. It was an odd request. Nearly impossible.

Ben made it happen anyway.

He guided her there blindfolded, one hand wrapped securely around hers. When they reached the grass, music bloomed behind them—her friend’s band covering the song they loved most.

“Are you kidding me?” Angie laughed. “What—oh my god, what’s happening?”

Ben removed the blindfold.

“Remember when you said this place was impossible to get?” he asked, arms folding around her as he tried to stay calm.

Her body bounced with joy. Her eyes filled.

“We got it, babe.”

She screamed—pure, unfiltered happiness—and broke from his arms only to launch herself back into them, kissing him breathless.

“Is there anything you can’t do?”

“Anything we can’t,” he said softly, kissing her back, “we’ll figure out together.”

She swayed against him as the music carried on, humming the words under her breath.

“But I somehow
Slowly love you…”

“Angie?” Ben murmured.

Her steps faltered.

Her weight shifted—wrong, sudden, heavy. He adjusted instinctively, reaching for her face.

Time folded.

Her lips whispered, “a way.”

Her eyes rolled back.

Her head fell.

Ben’s knees hit the grass.

The music stopped.

People rushed forward.

Phones came out.

Angie’s nose began to bleed. Her breathing turned wet and uneven.

No one called 911.

They recorded Ben holding her as she died of an aneurysm in his arms.

“It was our wedding anniversary,” Ben said later, at the eulogy. “We were planning—”

He couldn’t finish. There was no ending to reach.

After the wake, he asked Moira—Angie’s closest friend—to stay behind. He handed her two rings, each threaded onto a chain.

“We never got married,” he said quietly. “All I want is to spend the rest of my life with the woman I love.”

Moira stared at him, grief and horror colliding.

“Oh my fucking god, Ben—are you okay?”

“I just watched the woman I love die in my arms,” he said, breaking. “The least I can do is marry her. Grieve her properly.”

Since Moira was ordained, she performed the ceremony.

She placed Angie’s hand into Ben’s.
Then Ben’s into Angie’s.

“Angie,” she said softly, “do you take this man—”

A pipe banged somewhere in the walls.

They froze.

“And you, Ben?”

“I do.”

Moira lifted the rings—to the sky, to the floor, to the center—and placed the chains around their necks.

“By the powers of earth, time, and all planes between,” she said, “I pronounce you husband and wife.”

The year that followed hollowed Ben out. He lost his job. Sold the apartment. Moved back into his old place. Smoked too much. Drank more. Wondered if it would’ve been easier to follow her instead of surviving her.

By the next anniversary, he wandered the pier drunk and alone, drawn back to the grass without knowing why.

As night fell, people came and went. Eventually, there was no one.

He cried.

He cried as the scent of her perfume slipped into the air. As he felt the gentle press of a hand against his face. He remembered the moment he swore he could feel her soul leave her body.

“A husk,” he muttered.

“Hey,” a voice whispered. “I’m not a husk.”

Ben opened his eyes.

Angie sat in front of him, wearing her pale dress. The ring rested at her throat. She looked whole. Alive.

Ben choked on his breath and scrambled backward in terror.
“How—how did—what are you—”

“It’s our anniversary,” she said gently.

“Our wedding anniversary,” she clarified. “You had Moira perform the ceremony. Remember?”

At first, she told him, waking in the catacombs had been terror. Screaming. Panic. The realization that she was gone. Dying hadn’t just been losing her life—it had been losing him too.

“I don’t know how this is happening,” she said, tears welling. “It’s like you made a wish. And I came back.”

Ben crawled toward her slowly.

“Can I… touch you?”

She guided his hand to her chest. He felt warmth. A heartbeat. The rise and fall of her breath. Her birthmark. The ring.

“Is this permanent?” he asked quietly. “Do we have time?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is now.”

They kissed—saying everything they couldn’t yet put into words. Longing. Ache. Trauma. Love.

That night, he took her home.

They spoke for hours. Held each other until sleep claimed them both.

At 7:05 a.m., Ben’s alarm went off.

Angie slept beside him.

He smiled. He couldn’t wait to show Moira the miracle.

When Moira arrived, he grabbed her arm.
“You’re taking the day off. You’re coming with me.”

She pulled back immediately.
“Ben—are you okay? Like… really okay?”

“Yes,” he said urgently. “Please. Just come with me. Coffee. I need to show you something.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Once I figure out you’re tore up from the floor up, we’re going to the cuckoo’s nest.”

“I think once you see what I see,” Ben said, “you’re gonna think we should go together.”

Moira followed him, uneasy, back toward his apartment—just a few blocks away—completely unaware of what waited a few floors up.

Orpheus, Or The Violence Of Looking Back

A melodious swing drifting through wind,
born of Dream and Calliope,
came to touch her delicate cheeks,
wipe the tears from her face,
and meet the divine—
Eurydice’s soul.

A blush brushes the surface
of her tender skin,
revealing the soft fall of young
love.

A first love.
An only love.
Something so rare, so unseen—
untouched,
uncanny upon Gaia,
as though it could not possibly
be.

He plays beautifully at their union,
her movements finessed with every note.
She dances with the air,
disappearing into each pluck,
each ping, each sound—
into the trees.

Consent begins to dissolve.

With the sway of hips
against the long blades of grass,
the crowd moves hypnotically
and suddenly forgets
how to see.

The music forgets how to sound.

Eurydice realizes she has lost herself
in the arms of a strange man.

He lifts her—
eyes hungrily grazing her body.

What do you wan—

Before the thought can finish forming,
he lowers his face.
Thunder folds into her,
shaking her sense of place.

He whispers,
to know your ache.

The earth holds its breath.

Suddenly—
as quickly as the stranger takes Eurydice,
a snake bites her ankle.

She screams.

The crowd regains its sight.
Orpheus hears her cries.

When she is found,
the stranger has vanished.

Eurydice is dead.

The snake coils beside her,
as if waiting—
guarding her body,
keeping her unharmed,
though it was
the very thing that killed her.

It watches Orpheus as it slithers away,
its stare almost threatening,
almost judging,
as Eurydice is slowly dragged
into the Underworld.

Orpheus travels past the Styx,
into dark, murky crevices
where he meets
Hades and Persephone—
against their will.

He petitions them,
begging for the love of his life
to be returned
with one song
to pierce Hades’ unrelenting dark.

With Persephone’s persuasion,
Hades agrees.

The lyre plays.
Orpheus sings.
The Underworld fills with light—
a glory known only to Olympus,
if only for a moment.

Moved by feelings long unfelt,
they grant him his love
under one condition.

Hades smiles gently at Persephone,
wipes the tear from her face,
remembering the years of life,
the pain endured—
all that she endured.

Her resilience.

“As you wish, my love,” he says,
pressing her warm, floral hand
to his cold lips.

She turns to Orpheus.

“Eurydice is yours, my dear boy.
I have placed her behind you.
Do. Not. Turn. Around.

You will hear her.
You will feel her.
You will want to look back.
Don’t.

Don’t even speak to her.

Your love brought you here—
against everything.
With a lyre and song,
you moved us like moons pull tides.

If you fought darkness to reach her,
you can walk through it with her,
knowing the only way to protect her
is to look toward the light—
toward Gaia.

You must trust it.
You must trust her.
Trust love.”

He nods.

The Underworld opens.

Something—
someone—
takes his hand.

A cold touch.
(Be.)

He shivers and walks forward,
holding the hand behind him.

Don’t look back.

The light of Gaia is near,
but the path is violent, mischievous.

“Orpheus, why won’t you talk to me?”
“Can’t you hear me?”
“Please— I’m afraid.”

He cannot.
He will not.

Not until he is out.
Not until he is free.

Yet with every step,
his spirit aches—
because it sounds like her,
feels like her,
smells like her.

It is Eurydice.

Her hand is cold.
She is afraid.
They are so close.

What if—
just once—
he looked?

To see if she was whole.
To know it was truly her.
To kiss her once.
To tell her he loved her.

Grass brushes their feet.
The exit nears.
Her hand grows warm.

“My love…” she sobs.

He turns.

Reaching for the tear on her cheek—

She is gone.

He gasps.
Breath fractures.
Panic.
(Be.)

Orpheus walks on,
propelled by shock,
burdened by pain—
losing the only woman he loved
not to fate,
but to disbelief.

He forgot her trust.
Her faith.

She never spoke.
Never questioned.
She followed.

Held his hand.
Closed her eyes.
Let herself be guided—
as instructed.

“You have to trust him.
That love.”
(Believe.)

She did.

Orpheus will never know
how deeply she loved him.
How completely she trusted.

He will only know devastation—
born of immaturity, insecurity,
and the need to see.

Something in the darkness
he should have already known
was as real as the hand
touching him.
(Believe.)

He will let others numb him,
disembody him,
to dull the pain of love lost.

But nothing will sever him
from the love he failed—
his sweet Eurydice.

Orpheus walks on.

Not forward—
but emptied.

The world receives him again,
grass underfoot,
sun on skin,
life continuing as if nothing sacred
has been broken.

But something has.

Inside him,
the music rots,
spoiling down from his skin
into the soil,
seeping into the depths,
playing its mourning songs
into the Underworld—

where Eurydice cries her loss
in betrayal
against Persephone’s kind bosom.

Above,

Orpheus tells himself stories—
that love was cruel,
that gods are tricksters,
that Eurydice slipped because she was weak,
because fate is careless,
because the world conspires.

Anything
but the truth:

He did not trust her.

He begins to fracture.

First, the song leaves him.
Then the will to touch.
Then the want to live among bodies.

He wanders.
He refuses women.
Refuses warmth.
Refuses flesh.

He speaks only to trees,
to stone,
to absence.

And absence answers nothing.

They come for him quietly.

Hands that are not divine,
not merciful—
but human.

They do not hate him.
They do not love him.

They tear.

Arms first—
the hands that once played the lyre,
that once held Eurydice’s
without ever feeling her trust.

They rip them away.

He screams,
but the sound means nothing now.

His chest is split—
the place where belief should have lived,
opened and emptied.

His legs are taken—
the legs that walked toward light
but stopped short,
that chose sight over faith.

Piece by piece,
his body is unmade.

Yet—
he does not die.

What remains
is his head.

Eyes intact.
Mouth intact.
Memory intact.

Still thinking.
Still knowing.

Still remembering
the warmth of her hand
just before it vanished.

The river carries him.

He cannot close his eyes.
He cannot forget.

He sings no more—
but his mind sings endlessly,
replaying the moment
he turned.

The blade of realization
cuts forever:

She trusted him completely.
She did everything right.
He failed her.

Eternity is not fire.
It is awareness.

To exist without a body—
without hands to create,
without arms to hold,
without a heart to justify—

only a mouth
to repeat the truth.

Only a head
to know
that love was offered fully
and refused.

And the world listens
as Orpheus floats,
still alive,
still conscious—

a monument
to disbelief.

Author’s Note: I began thinking about this version of Orpheus and Eurydice after watching The Sandman. It made me reflect on how many versions of Greek mythology exist, and how we’re always—consciously or not—choosing which ones we believe in most. This poem is a blending of the versions I could stand behind.

One of the things I’ve always loved is the story of Dream and Calliope creating Orpheus. In The Sandman, Dream technically could have returned Eurydice to his son—but doing so would have violated every code he lives by and ignited divine infighting and war. And ultimately, that fight was never Dream’s. It was Orpheus’s.

Orpheus asking his father to fix what he lost has always struck me as childish—less about love, more about unresolved power and entitlement. There’s a reason I didn’t include that aspect here.

I also wanted to reframe the snake.

Snakes are often given a bad reputation, but in my culture they represent strength, fertility, and the connection between realms. To make the snake purely evil never made sense to me. In this version, the snake is Gaia—protecting Eurydice, not harming her.

Gaia has watched Zeus take women without their consent again and again. This time, she intervenes. Death is not punishment here; it is removal. Protection. A chance.

With Hades and Persephone, Eurydice has that chance.

The version of Hades and Persephone I draw from is inspired by Lore Olympus: a relationship rooted in devotion, patience, and trust. Hades could have made the decision himself—but instead, he defers to Persephone, because he understands that love is proven not through control, but through trust.

That trust is the test Orpheus fails.

In almost every version of this myth, Orpheus never makes it out with Eurydice. Something always compels him to turn around—to doubt her, to doubt himself, to doubt love. That repetition raises the question: Was it ever true love at all?

This poem is my attempt to answer that—by giving Eurydice her own truth.

She trusted.
She loved.
She stayed.

The gods were not cruel.

He was simply not ready. - Evy Gonzalez Ronceria

Mio

(In this piece, the mirror becomes a gallery. Mío is an act of self-curation — a quiet defiance against every gaze that once claimed ownership. What was once painted for others is now sacred, deliberate, and hers alone.)

———————-

Me maquillo
con una paz.

Respiro profundo,
tocando mi labial,
sabiendo que ninguno
me la va a quitar.

Esto es pa’ mí.
Todo para mí.

Soy una obra de arte.
He esperado tanto tiempo
para ponerte en exhibición,
sin temor, sin pensar
en los demás.

Sin miedo de que algún hombre
vuelva a posar sus manos
sobre tus lindas pinturas.

Ya no.
Todo esto.

Todo lo pinto para mí.
Y nadie me lo quitará sino yo.

English (translation / companion version)

I paint my face
in peace.

I breathe deep,
fingers on my lipstick,
knowing no one
can take this from me.

This is for me.
All of it, for me.

I am a work of art.
I’ve waited so long
to put you on display,
without fear, without thought
of anyone else.

No longer afraid
that some man will reach
for your lovely paintings.

No more.
All of it—
I paint it for me.

And no one will take it away
but me.

Here Come The Falls

She awakens in a vice of shadow and air—her breath twisted, lifted, siphoned away by the unseen.

In the dark there is nothing. Yet she knows this nothing: a weight settling over her like a blanket she never asked for—warm, steady, looming.

A tear slides across her cheek as her fists curl, straining against an invisible bind. The weight holds fast, pressing with an intent older than her name.

“Move.”

A gasp escapes her. The grip loosens. She spills free of its intangible limbs, her skin alight with a thousand needlepoints of pain. Her palms trace slow, soothing circles over her arms and legs. Sitting up, she takes in the black—thick, endless—until her gaze drops to her feet.

Just beyond the mattress, her Italian Greyhound stands rigid, barking soundlessly—at her.

Before her hand could reach him, he bolted into the abyss. Her eyes fixed on the direction he ran, and with a sinking feeling she began to follow. Suddenly she tripped down invisible steps and gasped. Her feet caught on ground that felt wet, almost breathing.

As her eyes adjusted, all she could see and feel was a dark, warm brown hue surrounding her, a beat thrumming within and through her body—almost celestial.

Little by little she walked, sinking into some places, falling through others—sand or water, she couldn’t tell. It felt like the sands of time—or something. She didn’t know, couldn’t understand. Familiarity and fear pressed against her, threaded with calm.

She felt like water pouring into a plastic cup, recalling a drink poured into his hand. How she wished she could pour herself as gently into his fingers, touch his fingers—she’s touching his fingers…

Touching his fingers… everything stills.

“Close your eyes.”

She closes her eyes. The room vibrates, singing in a language only familiar to her in REM. The aurora borealis shifts in constant waves, and within its movement she sees his visage. Through the watery sands she walks to him.

She says nothing. Here exists only this space—the emotions, the past and present, the histories, the finite and infinite. She holds him close, giving and absorbing in a lovely loop, mending and sewing shut the little pieces left open long ago.

As she continues to enmesh with him, their bodies becoming one, she feels this: home.

“I’m home.”

A crack. Her eyes open. She sees herself as a child outside a glass house, nose bloodied. Her head lifts from his chest.

He’s gone. She runs, the crack widening as water begins to fall from above and rise around her, locking her in. Darkness consumes her as the glass shatters and cold liquid floods in, swallowing her at the pace of a typhoon. She chokes, drowning, swallowing the flood. Darkness floods her eyes, liquid filling her ears and lungs. Nothing can hear the suffocated…

Sound.

Sound.

The sound of a bark. Jasper’s bark. A gasp escapes her.

Her eyes flutter. She mutters in pain, jaw loosening as she spills to her side. Her palms trace slow, soothing circles over her arms and legs, cradling herself.

Slowly sitting up, she looks at her reflection in the dark window, though no reflection truly looks back. She gathers herself in her arms as if holding another body. A whimper slips out, soft and breaking, before she whispers—

“Oh… I miss who you were, before I knew.”