CSK

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 place you know. ...

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. What I have...

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 hand as I started...