I attended counseling sessions for a year, retelling the story of that night until it felt like a lie. But pain is loud and demands to be acknowledged. I believed it was always the roommate's word against mine and I told myself no action could be taken. Words don’t always have as much meaning as I give them. I had no evidence. Only the hurt of living with a piece of my body that had rotted in his hands.

I’ve spent so long locking all the doors, painting all the windows shut, fastening all the memories to one another and burying them in the backyard. It seems impossible I’m standing in the old bedroom again because I swore the last time I burned this building down.

I knew even before I got pregnant that my trauma would shape the way I gave birth. As a Pelvic Physical Therapist, I had seen how fear and anxiety surrounding birth could stall labor, make labor more painful, and even prevent a vaginal birth. I was determined not to let this happen to me.

Women have been conditioned to violence and fear at the hands of those who would not be here if a womb had not hugged them to life 

Shouldn’t we be allowed to be messy and figure things out as they come and in our own individual ways, no matter how long it takes or what measures need to be taken? Shouldn’t we be able to have the time — above all things, the time — and support to sit in our emotions and understand them before they understand us?

I thought losing her this time would be easier knowing it was coming quickly quicker than the last two times. Two years have already passed. I didn’t notice the minutes getting shorter because I was loving my mother again.

After a time, I stopped closing my bedroom door. I sacrificed my precious teenaged privacy for a door that couldn’t be kicked open. I studied everyone’s gait in the house and could instinctively read danger or safety by the weight and velocity of the footfall coming up the stairs.

and as memories reopen wounds we once thought we could escape, they will burn like cinders borne in a grave. so let them burn like civilization’s collapsed castles & civilization’s eroded empires.

With relatives 4,655 miles away, there was a sticky film of warranted embarrassment and shame that I couldn't get past, having lost the most valuable thing I could have inherited––the ability to communicate with them without having to think about how I must say what I wished to say.