Somewhere out there, there is a version of myself that never knew your carefully placed wrath, never felt the sting of your vodka filled hands, or the spine tingling chill of your words.

Eleven pounds is what you weighed when I brought you home from the hospital 58 days after your birth. For the first year of your life, you slept on top of me every night, an increasingly heavy but reassuring weight.

Just a remnant of those herded onto ships months ago, we have been divided, have been examined and bargained for but not yet fed.

I used to think nature was innocent. Now I think nature wants to live at all costs.

I know I only have a few seconds to relish the deep wave of love that comes over me when I see his face. It will soon be replaced by the need to fortify myself. His anger will surface soon and I will be blamed in some way for his suffering. I’ve had to crawl my way out of the pit that was my obsession with his well-being. It took fifteen years. It felt like a betrayal to him, but it had to happen.

I watch as men in uniform hand his wife an American flag. “That should be my mother’s,” I whisper to myself.

There is irony in undergoing a passive medical procedure to be active again. And it’s painful knowing the thing I love to do is hurting me in return. In this case, freedom illuminates the fragile cage of my body.

I counted all the ways I was not enough. Looked for all the reasons I wasn’t worthy of walking among the healing, could these others see it on me? Could they smell it? Did the way I walked betray it? Emblazoned on my spine like a title: The Rape Kit. The Rape Survivor. The Rape Victim. The Rape. The Rape. The Rape that was as essential to me then as my own heartbeat. Maybe more.

I tried to tailor the tattered tapestry of your arcane inner thoughts, lace-up a labyrinth of lament with love, and silently suture a sanguine sackcloth of self-immolation

The next years will bring more depressing discoveries, I am sure. More moments of fear; more wrestling matches with my mean brain. The familiar field of my body will be a source of anxiety as wrinkles change the shape of my face, new aches arise, and I find lumps in unexpected places.

When judging character, I place a lot of weight on how someone interacts with children, even when I’m not pregnant. He passed the test. It wasn’t long until things progressed—and fast. He moved in before the baby was born. Twenty-three years later, he’s still here.

I navigate through the world each day by locating others' perceived problems and calculating what I can do to fix them. Rarely does anyone ask me to intervene in their (non-)problems. It's an instinct as ingrained in me as the urge to hold your breath when you plunge into the ocean. Often, I'm not even helpful.

In my dreams, you are still flying across the face of the sun.

how happy we were to sleep together, before insomnia and joints that can’t find comfort, before snoring and restless legs

“You’re going to find out what happened to Mom?” he asked, a little nervous. But he quickly granted permission. What was he hoping for, I wonder? As I reflect now – years after my dad’s death – I think he wanted those charts to document her love. Perhaps some doctor’s notes confirming that Isabel never meant to leave her three sons.

I’m a prisoner in my own flesh. My consciousness is the warden, the people around me become the inmates of my creation

I’ve never felt so damn fragile since you chose to leave. Haunted and yet somehow fascinated. Knowing now exactly what ‘Found in a vehicle’ amounts to.

We found, as we shared our interpersonal lives, that our narratives varied in circumstance, from illness to accident, stillbirth, and suicide, but the outcome for each of our children had been the same. Child loss, in many ways ostracizes one from their known realms of society and we sought out a more authentic connection to those with knowing hearts.

Sometimes, I think to be me is to be full of empty places. To fill a table with everyone who once loved me, then stopped.

Love soon meant the warmth of tears on my cheeks, the itch that came with the healing of skin cut and rubbed raw by the carpet in his bedroom. It meant a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the unbearable knowledge that I had been irreparably changed.