he bought my innocent time with promises of candy and wine but when i opened my eyes, i learned that those were just lies for him to feel my underaged insides. fourteen years old, in chicago, when i ran out into the february frost. i collapsed, then decorated the street with this agony i refused to accept. and this, the trauma that i could not eat. there, beneath the famous lights of wrigley field, i cried until my tattoo tears erased the sparkle from my eyes, unable to survive after learning that the world could also be like this. the vicious, windy city won this wicked war, burying me alive that night, without a fight. it threw the ashes of my adolescence in the air, like criminal confetti. it stripped away my security, to soak me in my own sorrow. i crawled into the cocoon inside my head. remaining here in this self-induced coma until i'd shed the sympathy-stained skin of being a victim. i REFUSE to be anything but resilient. still, no butterfly should ...
Accident-prone yet bulletproof, resilience courses through my veins. After pulling shrapnel from my own hell-bent self-destruction, all I was left with was me. Through embracing my darkness, I found the light. Here lives a collection of poetry, prose, and reflections on trauma, survival, desire, and becoming.