Hands pressed palm to palm, we compare the size and shape of fingernails that swoop up instead of lying flat, a subtle ancestral rebellion from the nail bed. A sisterly show-and-tell for the galaxy of scars which constellate our bodies, or a candid conversation on our various wrinkles, already spreading like dark magic from face to neck to hand.

Picture this: a girl hardened by a family riddled with addiction on the cusp of adulthood herself, readjusting into what it means to be truly taken care of. Truly? In the sense that someone rescued her before she could do more harm to herself.

These things: / dreams, hopes, love, / the intangible / aspects of myself I wanted / so badly to create, / to keep and harvest.

One day I dream / I will feel loved / One day I imagine / I will feel in control

I have vague memories of climbing into my sleeping bag, the puffed sleeves of my nightgown bunched around my ears, salt on my lips, the smell of wood smoke and sisterhood teasing the air. When I share these memories with my mom, she tells me they’re false.

If I closed my eyes and focused my senses, I could pretend the birds chirping in the distance were the same ones that woke me up in the mornings, and that my mom was just down the aisle, planning dinner and watching me through the corner of her eye. 

Might our wishes be to say, something we left unsaid, / To those no longer with us, upon wispy clouds they tread. 

There was distant laughter and flames that offered no heat / only illumination of faces that will forever be unknown.

Boys named Dallas or Austin just don’t last that long, I know, / big dreams hailing from rusted-cars and unmowed yards. / Little aspirations mewing from a heap of rags in the abandoned shed.

I’ve always thought that summer was for ghosts, or at least for / the empty feeling of cotton candy placed on your tongue by the boy / who loved you at fifteen but by sixteen had forgotten your name.

Windows represent a sense of inquiry, illumination, and insight to me. Some of my favorite windows have been Tiffany-stained glass that I can gaze at appreciatively, the expansive floor to ceiling windows in my Oakland home from which I can see the rugged landscape and sprawling cityscape, and the small windows on an airplane, where I can travel through the clouds.

As the lone hyperactive child in a family of indoor kids and the daughter of a mother who wasn’t the type to “play,” television became my medicine. Ritalin to control my nervous energy, Lexapro to soothe my anxiety, Prozac when things got depressing.

If time is like bright beads / on a string, I hope / it tangles a bit, so we can meet / each other / again.

And I suppose it’s also life / To get old by mistake / While trying to express / Who you truly are.

Anxiety unfolded its presence in my life slowly, waiting for me to catch on and give it a name. Throughout my childhood, it creeped as an octopus does across the ocean floor, stretching its tentacles and changing its color to blend in with my surroundings. By the time of adolescence, all eight tentacles wrapped around my mind. Every time I managed to free myself of one, another grew back in its place.

Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of my life obsessed with the idea of love, or, rather, the idea that I will love myself if a man loves me. I thought, wrongly, that finding a man was the only thing that mattered. Once I could do that, the rest of my life would fall into place; I would be happy.

Eventually, even the kind gestures will become / a burden: one more thank you card to write, / an hour to pretend you care about anything / other than the mountains and valleys of vitals / scrolling across the screen.

Don’t you see—there are dances left on my dance card, / minutes and days, months and years / to love hard and kiss my babies, / see them stand under the wedding canopy / and enough time to do some good in this crazy world.

i’ll see the disgust on your face once more / when all of my insecurities come to surface / when i try too hard to prove my worth to you / when my sentences are trite and childish 

There were no electric fences or steel gates locking us in. No alarm system. There was nowhere to go. The idea of running away was ridiculous. The purveyors of these institutions do this on purpose. Their “therapeutic” boarding schools are built far away from anywhere to run to, one more reminder that your life is entirely under their control.