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A few weeks after the funeral, someone at the district attorney's office handed me a USB stick. That's how I received them. A small physical thing, pressed into my hand across a desk. Thirteen farewell videos, on an object you could lose between couch cushions. I went home to my parents' house, where I was living at the time. A temporary shelter in the way only your childhood home can be: familiar and strange at the same time, not quite yours anymore, but still the safest p

Forty-one arrived quietly. No crisis, no spiral, no list of things I should have accomplished by now. Just a calm morning and the small, almost strange realization that I am still here, and that I am okay. There were years when I wasn't sure either of those things would be true. So I've stopped taking the quiet for granted. This birthday didn't feel like getting older. It felt like proof. I've lived enough for a few lifetimes, and I've left pieces of myself in a lot of places

Grieving someone who hurt you is its own kind of madness. You're never sure which version of them you're mourning, or whether you should be mourning at all. The hours after the apartment are mostly a blur. I remember my friend taking me back to her place, getting me into her bed, wrapping me in a heavy blanket and asking me to please rest. I was so spent that I passed out under the weight of it and slept. Some moments, though, are engraved. The weight of my phone in my ha

First solo trip with my Mom to London I sometimes think about the version of myself who, in April 2019, believed the worst was already behind her. She had just been accepted into a law degree at the University of London. It was the first big thing she'd chosen for herself in nearly a decade. She wanted to advocate for vulnerable children one day, and the acceptance felt like proof that the door was still open, that she was still capable of building something. She was proud

For the first time in years, it was quiet. After so long inside his constant presence, a presence that dictated my every move, my reactions, even the thoughts I was allowed to have, the silence was both relief and shock. I had been conditioned to revolve around his moods, to scan the room before I knew what I myself wanted. Now there was nothing to read anymore. Just space. And at first, I had no idea what to do with it. I scroll back through my phone sometimes, and the first

I was standing outside a club, furious about something that seems insignificant now, swearing to my best friend with the full range of my vocabulary, when someone I'd barely spoken to walked over. "You do know that swearing shows a lack of vocabulary?" We'd met inside through common friends, but hadn't really interacted. It didn't seem to matter to him. Red flag. Obviously. But not to me, not then. I was shocked, and then I was intrigued. No one had ever spoken to me like th

The first time I said the word out loud, I was on holiday with two friends. Abuse. I had been living inside it for years and I had never named it, not to my family, not to my closest friends, not really to myself. One close friend had suspected something for a long time, but she had never pushed, and I had never offered. So I carried it alone, which is its own kind of weight. And then one day, somewhere far from home, it came out of me. The relief of being seen was almost phy