If this were a story, it would start in the middle—because that’s how these things go, right? Not at the bright, screaming beginning, where a girl is born into a house that is more war zone than home. Not at the end, where she stands, whole and breathing, on the other side of it all. No, it starts where it always does, in the liminal space between destruction and survival.
Let’s set the scene: a girl (me, but let’s pretend we don’t know that yet) walks a thin line between oblivion and existence. Heroin is a warm hand pressed against her forehead, whispering, shh, shh, don’t think too hard. It softens the edges of everything—until it doesn’t. Until it sharpens them instead, until it pulls her under so deep that the surface feels like a myth.
But here’s the thing about the abyss: it’s greedy. It doesn’t just want your pain; it wants your whole damn life. And at some point, between the needle and the nights she couldn’t quite remember, the abyss found new ways to swallow her whole. Men who weren’t men but monsters, a body that became a thing for other people to use, a world that kept spinning, unaware that she had fallen straight through the cracks.
If this were a different kind of story, maybe she would have stayed there. Maybe she would have become another cautionary tale, another obituary that people shook their heads at before moving on. But this is not that story.
Instead, she woke up. And not in the way that happens every morning when the sun drags you out of unconsciousness. No, she woke up. Realized, in the way that breaks bones and sears the lungs, that if she didn’t fight for herself, no one else would. So she did. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t poetic. It was raw and brutal and full of the kind of ugly crying that makes your whole body shake. But she climbed out. One inch at a time.
And here’s where we skip ahead, past the worst of it. Not because it didn’t matter—God, it mattered—but because it’s not who she is. Who she is? A mother. A woman who knows her own strength. A person who laughs, loudly and often, because she knows what it’s like to think she’d never laugh again.
If this were a story, it would end here, tied up neatly with a bow. But life isn’t like that. The past still lingers, a ghost in the corner of the room. Some days, it still whispers. But she knows now how to whisper back:
Not today. Not anymore.
B 🤍
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