A House Without Mirrors

By Salem Youngblood

I was born on a windless day, her first breath fought and strangled in a creaking world of wood and dust, shadows hung low and heavy like thieves. Lexi Lugner knew she was out of tune with the world before she understood what that meant. It was in how she did not belong in the crook of her mother’s arm, but was instead held still and silent as a dead butterfly. In how the other children’s voices wove in keys that danced around her too bright and blaring as bells of silver. How they did not notice she was a flat note that jarred the song, how they left her out of their games, how she tried to play alone with words and stones and worms, like the other children but without them. 

There is a saying that children do not remember the pains and hardships of their earliest years. This is wrong. She did not forget. She—who once was her but had to be locked away into the prisons of her memory so that she might live—she did not forget. She remembered the buzz of fluorescent lighting in the classroom like swarms of wasps, the chalk screeching against the board like a scream kept just behind the teeth. She remembered the slow fall of silence when she did not answer fast enough, the derision that settled around her like shadows at dusk. 

This world was made with rules that she had never been given. 

Other girls held hands in pairs. She held her breath instead. Other boys ran and collided and bruised and laughed, she sat under the desk, staring at the tiles of the floor like they were foreign countries, each one safer than the last. The air was too much. The fabric of the clothes was too much. The voices were too much. So she willed herself inward, to fold and wrinkle into something smaller, until her ribs were a locked box and her throat a tomb. 

“They call you ‘shy,’” they said, “as though that were the name of the cage you hide in.” “They call you ‘strange’,” they said, “as if to name the wound makes it disappear.” “Stop crying,” they said, not understanding that she already had—inside, where no one else could see. 

But it was not all grey. 

The world was not without its quiet joys, small things that glitter like oil on water: the shushing of books, the scent of old leather and ink in libraries where no one else went. The way a crow would cock its head as though it understood, truly and completely. The song of rain on a rooftop. The holy silence of snow. She knew the secret lives of shadows, knew the names of trees. She knew how to listen to what other people called nothing. 

And there was the moon. 

Ah, the moon—mute and brilliant and not needing any words to set her aflame. Under her cold, watchful eye, she was almost holy. Almost whole. 

The years went by. The girl became the woman writing this and still the mirror distorts. Still, I feel when I walk into rooms that I am too much or not enough—never quite the right shape to cast a shadow in. I have spent a lifetime wearing masks that fit better than my own face. I have

smiled through migraines. I have laughed through static. I have explained myself in a hundred soft tones so that others are comfortable, while I feel my own walls crumbling like ancient ruins. 

But still. 

There is a strange kind of power in being not-belonging in the way that it is a feast, and you are not invited. I see what others cannot. I feel storms long before the first clouds gather. My loneliness is not a hollow space, but a cathedral filled with my own echo until I can learn to love that sound. 

If there is tragedy in being other, there is also a strange kind of beauty in surviving. The kind of beauty that moss takes on gravestones, that owls take in twilight, that ghostlight takes on moors. 

I am still that child, in some ways. Still counting the tiles of the floor. Still tracing the stars. Still hearing the world too loud and too near. But I am also the one who remembers. The keeper of those bones. The archivist of the ache. The one who can write this now, and in doing so, pull back the silence and make it sacred. 

I don’t remember a moment of my life not shadowed by fear. 

It’s there, even when she’s laughing: some coiled in her back, some anticipation curled beneath joy like worms beneath fruit. Even when she’s happy, even when her hands move with light and her voice weaves constellations that no one else can fathom, it’s there: heavy, brutal. A bell of iron where her heart should be. Ringing. 

She was eight when they started giving her medication. 

Eight years old and already classified as broken. Already “too much.” Already damaged in ways they didn’t care to name, only to silence. They gave her pills in plastic bottles with caps designed for childproofing—how goddamned cruel that they thought those small hands could not master the ways that would unlock what her soul had already ingested. Antidepressants first, then Adderall, doses so high she felt physically toxic. No one explained what the pills were, only that they would make her easier. Better. Quiet. 

They said they loved her brain. 

But only when it was leashed. 

Only when it was quiet and polite. 

She took them because they said to. Because she hadn’t learned to question the word trust. Because, at that age, you think the world knows better than your own quivering heart. But her body knew. Her bones knew. Her mind, once expansive and radiant, dimmed beneath sedation. She slept and dreamt of falling. She woke and still fell.

There was no storm, no battle cry. No great yelling no more. Only the slow quieting. The dimming of the lamp. 

She didn’t know why her chest hurt for no reason. Why her hands shook. Why her voice lodged in her throat like a sparrow in wire. No one told her it was the medicine. No one told her it was neglect. No one told her that feeling too much and nothing all at once was not a normal part of being eight years old. 

And when she started flinching at sudden noises, forgetting her name in large rooms, staring at walls for hours while hearing things in the silence—still, they only asked if she had taken her pills. They never asked if the pills were hurting her. They never asked what it was like in there. 

Because to ask would be to look. And to look would be to see. And to see her—truly see her—would be to face the shame of not loving her as she was but only as she was shrunk small enough to manage. 

I didn’t know what I was putting in my body. Not at first. 

I only knew that I was tired. So very tired. That I felt simultaneously hollow and swollen. That I would cry for no reason and then go days without shedding a single tear. That the world spun and I did not. That I could not tell them what was wrong because I had been taught that I was what was wrong. 

She learned to wear her sadness like a garment. Learned to take the pills and smile and nod and joke at jokes that cost her too much to laugh at. She learned that to survive meant to disappear in shards. 

And yet she lived. 

God help her, she lived. 

Even as her hands trembled. Even as the pills fogged her senses and the world blurrered. Even as every adult congratulated themselves for fixing her without ever taking the time to know her favorite color, her fears, the way her heart beat faster when someone complimented her too loudly. Even then, she lived. 

And I—who speak now with older lips and quieter rage—I carry her. I remember for her. And I will not let her be forgotten. 

Because she was not broken. 

She was bleeding in a world that refused to stitch up what it did not want to see. And still—she lived.

My earliest memory is not of happiness, nor of light. 

It is of offering. 

She stood before them—small hands held out, trembling not from fear but from hope. In her palms were her treasures: bleached-white by sun and by time, butterfly wings folded like origami within sheets of parchment. Sacred, her collection. A devotion. These were not trophies of morbidity, as they would come to say in years to come. Relics. Testaments to lives that once fluttered, scuttled, soared. To her, they were beautiful. 

But the other girls screamed. 

They shrieked and ran, eyes not with awe but with terror. The classroom came to life with their sound, their disgust, their turning away. And she stood there, rooted, as though seized mid-breath. In that silence that comes after the first recoil, something permanent branded itself into her. A truth too old for a child to bear: 

They will not understand you. 

You will be alone. 

That moment marked the beginning of a cycle. Rejection became a season she never outgrew. Every spring, she tried again—bringing something strange, something sacred—and every time, the world turned from her as though she were plague-ridden, as though she had touched death. 

But she had touched wonder. 

She loved the dark not for its absence but for its secrets. She loved the bones because they spoke to her of what had once lived, once run, once fed and fled and fought. She knew the names of scavengers, the shape of teeth in skulls, the miracles of predators designed by nature to be other. She saw beauty in the grotesque—not because she sought horror, but because she saw no horror in what the world had thrown away. 

Butterflies were her heart. The iridescence of their wings, like thin glass catching firelight. The delicate veins, so easily broken. She once described their flight as what poetry looked like when it forgot its meter. She loved them because they were transient, and therefore precious. 

So when the boy—the other child, whose name she cannot recall—took one from her palm and pinched it between his fingers, something in her splintered. 

He laughed. 

And that was when she hit him.

She punched him with fists not meant for violence but made righteous by grief. Over and over, little knuckles landing with more fury than form, until his nose bled and her hands were stained by it. Adults pulled her away, shouting, demanding answers. Demanding apologies. 

She gave none. 

Not because she did not know what she had done. 

But because she knew exactly what he had done. 

When they made her say the words—“I’m sorry”—they tasted of ash on her tongue. An empty phrase forced from her throat like bile. She was not sorry. She was incandescent. She was full of fire for what had been stolen. The butterfly had done nothing. It had merely existed. And for that, it was dead. 

She did not feel guilt. 

She felt justice. 

They called her aggressive. Troubled. Lacking remorse. They never asked why she had carried the butterfly in the first place, or why her hands shook after—not from fear but from restraint. No one noticed the funeral she later gave for the broken wings beneath her bed. No one asked if the bones she hoarded were friends in their absence. 

But I remember. 

I remember because I was her. Because I am her. Because her rage was not cruelty—it was grief in a child too young to know what it was. Because her loneliness was not a choice—it was chiseled into her with every step back, every sidelong glance, every moment her wonder was met with fear. 

They taught her not to feel too deeply. 

But they never taught her how to stop. 

My mother was a broken woman. A shattered woman. She was a woman like all women are shattered, though some of us shatter more spectacularly and some of us shatter in such curlicues that people mistake it for something other than weakness. 

She was never diagnosed with borderline, to my knowledge, or she refused to be. Maybe it was both. 

Denial and defiance are siblings, and she carried them both like jewels. 

Her mother before her—my grandmother—was a similar half-mirror, shattered in all the same dimensions. Some days she was the sun incarnate, hovering round us and honey and calling us darling and petting our hair like we were china. Then, suddenly, her hand would clench, her

voice would sharpen, and the plate you hadn’t quite finished would be yanked from your grasp and smashed in the sink—because you hadn’t said please or thank you quickly enough. Because you hadn’t flattered her the right way. 

She was smart. 

Astute. Brilliant. She could read the human mind like an anatomy book and words instead of scalpel knives. She helped junkies. She helped strangers. She knew what trauma could do. How it could rebound from generation to generation like thunder that could never stop. 

But she could not heal herself. 

As so many healers cannot. 

Drinking was her death and her salvation. 

The first six years of my life, she was sober. But then she relapsed. Not with a yell or a bang, but with a sigh, a hush like the lighting of a candle after dark. Her prettiness could not hold back the tide of what it meant to mother a child like me. A child too quiet and too intense and too other. 

She tried. 

But some tempests cannot be weathered. They are only postponed. 

The trash bags were the first clue—bulging, crinkling, heavy with the rattle of bottles that should have sung celebration but instead droned low dirges of disaster. Whole garbage bags of glass, buried in onion skins and denial and shame. But she was a functioning alcoholic. A functioning mother. Brilliantly so. Her coworkers never knew. No therapist guessed. She wore her hangovers like perfume—haute couture, bitter and familiar. 

Her smile could stop traffic. Her laughter—it lit up the room. Even when drunk, she was stunning. But it was the sort of beauty that flickered, always on the verge of expiring. 

I remember the burn marks on her waterbed. The cigarette ash that trickled down into craters and threatened to consume her as she slept. I was six years old and I learned how to put out fires not with shrieks, but with practice. I learned to cook because hunger never gives a damn if your mother is passed out. I learned to budget grocery money because she left envelopes of cash like apologies, then disappeared for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. 

And no one asked. 

The mailman. The grocer. The delivery men who dropped off cases of sparkling water and Lean Cuisine. No one scrutinized the child at the door. No one questioned why a little girl had memorized oven timers and fire extinguishers before she could spell her last name.

She—myself, the child she was—didn’t cry about it. Not then. Not with sound. She knew better. Tears were a privilege, and she had traded hers for instinct. She was soft only with animals. With moths and with wounded birds. With small quiet things. Because people were not safe. Because love was earned. Because even the hands that fed you might shake you if they found no food inside. 

And when the spiral became too wide, when the drinking became a tidal wave she could no longer contain, my grandmother had to drive across states, from Florida to Colorado just to get my mother’s stomach pumped. Not out of love. But out of necessity. To save her nursing license, her counseling practice, her façade. 

There is no shame in brokenness. 

But there is tragedy in silence. 

Because that child—myself, her, the one who cooked her own dinners and emptied the ashtrays—she was not unseen because she hid. 

She was unseen because people looked at her and didn’t see. 

And that blindness, that refusal to see, is a wound I still bear. 

She always said her mother had many boyfriends—a right no one had the power to take from her. Pleasure and love are as basic as human needs as water and air. But desire, untethered, can become a wolf in the hallway. And no child should be made to sleep beside its teeth. 

I don’t blame her for wanting love. 

I only wish she had been more careful. 

She did not need to hear them—men who came like shadows through the dark, heavy-footed and heavy-breathed and heavy-smelling like cigarettes and sex. She did not need to feel their eyes upon her, their hands creeping too close over dinner, their interest curling around her like smoke at the corners of her mother’s absence. 

She does not remember his face. 

But she remembers the pillow. 

She remembers how it pressed against her mouth, how the dark became teeth. She remembers the smell—vanilla, sickly sweet, the cheap phony scent of etiquette, like lighting a candle before every damn atrocity. Was he mad? Did he think himself gentle, with that candle as if the smell could mask the filth? As if the wax and wick could sanctify his sins? 

She was four the first time. 

Then five. 

Then six.

The candle always came first. 

Then the pressure. 

Then the hurt. 

Then the blood. 

And still the world turned. 

Still the sun rose. 

Still her mother hummed to the radio the next morning, never noticing how the child flinched at vanilla, how she braced at bedtime, how she folded in upon herself like an unread letter—words inside, creased closed. 

She never screamed. She learned early that sound is not salvation. 

She simply endured. 

As children do. 

As she did. 

When her mother moved them from Hawaii, she claimed it was for a “fresh start.” But to her, it was a eulogy. They left behind the coqui frogs—her only lullaby—their soft chirping like small hands holding her through the night. She left behind the sea, the soft air, and above all, her grandfather. The only one who ever gazed upon her with wonder, who called her mind a marvel, not a curse. 

They left behind the only place she had ever been close to safe. 

And no one ever knew. 

Not the teachers. 

Not the neighbors. 

Not the doctors who gave her pills for her nightmares. 

Not a single soul asked why she gagged at the smell of vanilla, why her artwork turned so dark, why she touched her own face as if to see if it were still there. 

She did not tell. 

Because no one showed her how. 

Because silence was already in her chest, a great black flower that bloomed inward, curling around her lungs, nourished by fear and the sour sap of shame. 

Now, years later, she cannot pass a scented candle shop without her stomach lurching. One sniff of waxy sweetness, and her throat closes. Vanilla is not comfort. Vanilla is a noose. 

And still, she walks. 

And still, she breathes. 

Though the child she was still shivers in her bones.

Mother found her Prince Charming. Not the marble statue, ink-splashed figment. No, her knight in shining armor was an awkward man with gentle hands and nervous smiles. A man tall like trees are tall: not threatening, just there. He rambled about galaxies on the other side of the universe with a religious fervor. He read dog-eared paperbacks stuffed with spells and spaceships. He believed in dragons the way other men believed in lawn care. 

He wanted a family. She wanted something that didn’t hurt. 

He wasn’t perfect—god, no one cut from patches of hope and old scars ever is—but he had an easy heart. The way his eyes crinkled when he laughed. The way he yanked her out of bed at six in the morning, feet bare and breath huffing, just to show off how he fixed the garage door. Up. Down. Behold my mighty handiwork. And he’d grin, grin like the whole world was a box of tiny, tiny chocolates and he’d won all of them. 

They got married. 

And so she—the girl made of fire and shadow—was taken to his home. A new world. One with stairs that moaned strange lullabies and cupboards stocked with foods she’d never seen. Mother, who had raised her daughter to be entirely self-sufficient for reasons of circumstance, now resented her independence. She grew sharp, jagged with self-contradictions. Why didn’t the girl want to be watched? Why didn’t she like lasagna or meatloaf—those hallowed relics of suburban comfort? Why did she ask for spam and white rice, or containers still hot with soy sauce and sesame? 

She didn’t understand, but neither did the girl. 

Why now, she wondered, must I be the child I never got to be? 

The man—her stepfather—didn’t understand her either, not really. But he tried. And to a girl raised in a graveyard, trying was holy. 

He taught her about Dungeons & Dragons, where suddenly the dark, strange, wind-chased corners of her mind had a home. Her gothic fantasies, which had once been met with concern or outright dismissal, were now shouted at over the flicker of a cheap, table candle. Her pain found expression in high magic and heavy dice. She built characters out of frayed edges and woven despair, and for once someone else wanted to listen. 

He showed her video games, too. He bought her her first set of games after bribing her with a ski trip (where she fell more than she stood and he never once yelled or snapped). But afterwards, they played together for hours and hours, hours and hours. Laughing and exploring strange lands and learning a new language of quests and combat and damage modifiers. 

She loved those times.

More than she could say. 

More than anyone ever truly knew. 

Rift. 

Baldur’s Gate. 

The premieres of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter where theater popcorn clung to her hands and cool night air clung to her hair and they all lit sparklers in the car in the neon glow of Target parking lots. Hands in sleeves, stuffed all the way up to her chin, face hot and alive with a million tiny butterflies—not because of plot twists or danger but because for just a little while, she belonged. 

These were not moments of salvation. 

They were not rescue narratives. 

But they were warm. And rare. And real. 

And in the waning half-light of memory, they sparkle like fireflies: transitory, holy, unforgettable. Mother gave birth to another son—small and round and pink as a sea-born pearl. He was beautiful in the newborn way that all babies are beautiful, still untouched by story and shame. She was gentler with him, at first. Maybe she wanted to start over. Rewrite the ending before the ink could set. 

But addiction is a loving man. It waits. It smiles. And it does not forget what is owed to it. 

So holidays were not spent baking cookies or reading long-favored stories. They were spent, instead, under cold fluorescent lights. The soft beeps and whirring of machines became her lullabies. IV poles were Christmas trees. The child she once had—the girl who could no longer bear to the edges of light and happiness—grew hard with bitterness. She stopped coming. Rage built in her chest, quiet and sharp as a wounded hawk. She thought: If you cared so little, why should I care at all? 

She regrets it now. 

Because after the drinking came the stomach. And then, the organs started whispering things about disloyalty and betrayal. Then came the cancer. 

It was not as they said it would be. It did not hollow her to the ribbons. Oh, no, it bloated her. The woman who had once been considered beautiful—willowy, thin-waisted, complimented on her grace by strangers at the grocery store—she started to gain weight. Her cheekbones disappeared. Her body—swollen with treatment and sickness and loss—became too large to ignore. And with it, the armor of her beauty fell away. 

And suddenly, the world stopped seeing her.

She cried. She came, shaking and shamed, not as the mother who had once pointed out her daughter’s “chunky thighs” at age eight. Not as the woman who told her, “you’ll never be loved if you keep eating like that.” Oh, no, she came—wracked and limp and mourning—in the carcass that once was her shield of beauty. 

And she begged her child to validate her fears. Her tears. But she couldn't. For when her mother cried that no one looked her in the eyes anymore. To her that was normal. No comfort came. 

Her mother died because she couldn't give up alcohol. And left her family behind who she did not love enough to stop. 

She raised her younger brother as a daughter might. It was no sacrifice. It was holy. It was sacred. 

It was never called that. 

It was called mature. Helpful. Never unnatural. Never unfair though it was both. 

She changed diapers before her own body knew how to. She could rock a colicky infant for hours with hips that swayed not from glee, but necessity. She knew how to unclasp his pudgy arms from his mother’s limp, drunken grasp without waking either of them. She knew how to sit straight up in the night, fevered herself, forehead burning and breath jagged, and still rub his back with one hand while she crouched over the toilet, lullabies leaking from lips barely keeping together. 

She was not a child. 

She was a ghost in one’s skin. 

And then—Mother died. 

She was downstairs when it happened, her brother at her side, playing with plastic farm animals and roaring at the top of his lungs. The EMTs came like clockwork. The sirens barely startled her anymore. She was angry. He was angry. Even her husband—the man who had tried—eyed the commotion like it was any other inconvenience, as if she would reappear a minute later, apologetic and bleary eyed. 

But this time she did not return. 

It was not peace that followed. It was not silence. It was collapse. Not a single moment of quiet, but a long and echoing disintegration. 

The man upstairs now had a one-year-old boy still on formula and a twelve-year-old girl with a mind too loud and too quiet all at once, brittle as winter glass and no diagnosis. He did not

forsake them. He tried—my god, how he tried. He folded grief into breakfast. He stitched effort into laundry. He never stopped loving. 

But love is not always enough. Not when grief becomes a language neither of you speak. Not when sorrow curdles into resentment and pain cannot be buried, only shared like an open wound passed between two shaking hands. 

They drifted. 

Not all at once. Not with slamming doors. 

But in sighs. In miscommunications. In days where no one smiled. In small cruelties uttered with exhausted mouths. 

Grief and anger grew in them like twin wolves—starving, snarling, fighting over a corpse already bloated and sour. They tore it apart again and again, each feeding frenzy leaving them more poisoned than the last. And still, it never ended. Still they went back. Still they fed. 

She heard him cry at night. 

He thought he was silent, but walls do not keep sorrow out. 

He sobbed into his pillow while the baby slept across the hall. 

And she, lying awake in her childhood bed, stared at the ceiling and felt something splinter in her again. 

Not for her mother—not anymore. 

But for him. 

For both of them. 

Because no one had taught them how to carry loss without it breaking their spines. No one told them that grief would turn them into strangers. That sometimes love, even when it stays, begins to limp. 

She never blamed him. 

She never will. 

But she still carries the guilt of not knowing how to hold him up while she was also drowning. Of being too much and never enough. 

Of seeing him break and not knowing how to say, me too. 

Her deepest regret does not wear the face of her mother. 

It wears the face of her brother. 

Not the man he is now.

But the boy he was then—soft-cheeked and trusting, with eyes too large for sorrow, too bright for what the world handed him. 

She was not always kind. 

She was not always gentle. 

There were days when the weight of grief, of responsibility, of silence and shame became a tempest in her body. And he—so near, so loud, so full of needs she could not meet—became the lightning rod. She screamed at him. Hit him. Slammed doors and hurled words too sharp for children. Words that lacerated in ways unseen, ways that festered. 

And he did not deserve that. 

She knows it now. 

She knew it then, too, but she buried it beneath the excuse of survival. 

She was a child, yes. A child who had lost her mother. A child pressed into the mold of a parent, without guidance or grace. A child walking through the ruins of her own mind while trying to raise another soul not to shatter. 

But she was still wrong. 

Grief does not excuse cruelty. 

Pain does not erase responsibility. 

And love—true love—must learn to name its failures. 

She would give anything to take it back. 

To rewrite the moments where she flinched at his crying instead of gathering him close. To undo the hours where her voice rose like a whip instead of a lullaby. 

To become, in those small and sacred hours, the safety he looked for in her eyes. 

Because he looked to her for shelter. 

And sometimes, she was a storm instead. 

She has said the words aloud, many times. Said them over the phone. Said them in letters. Said them in the quiet hours before the dawn. And yet, they never feel like enough. Because there are echoes in his memory, echoes she placed there, that she cannot chase away with words. 

He was only a child. 

And so was she. 

But only one of them remembers pain that should never have come from the other’s hands. She carries that.

Not as punishment—but as a promise. 

That should he ever ask. Should he ever need her voice to steady, her hands to hold, her back to carry what he cannot—she will answer. No hesitation. No delay. 

She cannot undo. 

But she can, perhaps, tend. 

And in this way, she grieves not only for the mother they lost… 

But for the sister she could have been, and failed to be. 

She had struggled with self-harm for as long as she could remember. Not in the romantic, storm-tossed way the poets spoke of—no. It began in quiet, primitive ways. Hair pulled from the scalp. Nails chewed to blood and nerve. Scratching until the skin broke. It was not poetry. It was survival. A ritual, ugly and private, done in silence when the world was too sharp. 

But pain is a creature that evolves. And so did she. 

It became cutting—first with hesitation, then with precision. 

Burns followed. Not to die. 

Just to breathe. 

Her arms. Her thighs. Her scalp. 

Anywhere the ache could be given shape. 

Because nothing else made sense. 

The grocery store was hell. The fluorescent lights buzzed like hornets in her skull. Children’s voices were too shrill. Plastic bags too crinkled. And school—God, school was a foreign language written in invisible ink. The lessons made no sense. The social rules even less. Everyone else moved in rhythm, and she… she was a dissonant note no one could harmonize with. 

She hated herself for it. 

Not for failing, but for being seen failing. For being strange, alien, too much and not enough. For every time her body took up space it didn’t deserve. For every glimpse of her reflection that felt like a threat. 

She covered her mirror for three years with a black garbage bag, taped at the corners like sealing a wound. She could not bear to look. Her stomach filled her with a shame so thick it clogged her throat. She remembers, too clearly, the night they found her half-conscious—razor in hand, trying to cut the flesh from her abdomen. Trying to peel the disgust from her bones. 

The hospital was cold. The lights too clean. The questions too clinical.

They wanted reasons. 

She had only feelings. 

And now? Now it is tattoos that keep the blade at bay. Not because she believes she is beautiful. Not because the pain has left. But because someone—an artist, a stranger—spent hours carving wonder into her skin. Into the same places she once desecrated. And to cut through that would feel like sacrilege. Not to herself. But to them. 

It is strange, the things that save us. 

Ink. Time. A stranger’s steady hand. 

Not love. Not healing. But interruption. 

She remembers when her self-harm first broke her stepfather’s heart. 

How he hovered at doorways. 

How he bought gauze and asked careful questions. 

How he looked, once, as though she were a map he was desperate to read. And then—slowly, terribly—it changed. 

She became an inconvenience. A burden, no longer frightening, just tiring. He looked at her wounds the way one looks at spilled milk. The kind of sigh reserved for filling out forms or bagging groceries alone. He never said it. He didn’t have to. She could feel it in his posture. In the way he passed her the bandages without speaking. 

That shift nearly killed her more than the wounds. 

Because when even your suffering is no longer urgent—when your pain is ordinary—it confirms the voice you’ve always heard in the dark: 

You are too much. And still not worth the effort. 

He remarried. 

She was a woman with sweetened lies and smiles too practiced to be real. She knew how to tilt her head, how to laugh just so, how to look down through her lashes as if she’d never raised her voice in rage. It was there, the signs were there, faint and glimmering like storm clouds at sea, but he was desperate not to be alone—and she, the child he once called daughter, was desperate for him to be happy. 

So they both turned a blind eye. 

And it came.

She was cruel in ways that left no bruises but wounds that cut deeper. She did not strike with fists, but with words sharpened to a knife’s edge, thrown with surgical precision. She knew how to cut. How to make it seem like the bleeding was your fault. 

Even now, years later, in rooms without her, the girl still hears that voice. 

There is nothing good about you. 

It repeats in silence. In failure. In doubt. 

It echoes in the way she flinches at praise, the way her hands tremble when she speaks too long. 

She hears that laughter, brittle and cruel, whenever she stumbles. Whenever she tries and is not perfect. 

That woman yelled. Screamed. 

Hurled plates with the force of spite, porcelain shrapnel that carved into skin. She always reeked—weed clinging to her like fog, vodka staining her breath into poison. 

She forbade her from washing clothes, from eating meals in the shared kitchen. She was locked in her room for hours, for days. Hunger curled its way into her belly like a feral thing. She learned to chew silence. To swallow tears. 

But there is one memory sharper than the rest—like glass beneath the skin. It was meant to be a celebration. A birthday dinner. 

The woman smiled, told her to order anything. Go on, she said, anything you want. And she—hopeful, so foolishly hopeful—ordered steak. Not because she felt entitled. But because for one breath of time, she believed she could be allowed to feel special. 

The air soured quickly. 

Shame followed. Tight-lipped remarks from both of them. Eyes glancing at prices. Voices saying too much, too expensive, not for you. The steak was not just meat—it became proof of her selfishness. Her gluttony. Her place. 

She barely ate. 

And in the parking lot, she held the to-go box like a wound. Her stomach turned not from hunger, but from guilt. 

Then the woman snatched it. Opened it. Flung it to the ground.

Steak, now covered in dirt and ash. A cigarette butt mashed into the juices. She smiled—that smile—and said, “That’s what you deserve.” 

Then she screamed. Screamed at her to eat it. To kneel down and eat what she had taken too eagerly. 

She didn’t. 

And for that disobedience, she was punished for months. 

Not with whips. 

But with silence. 

With meals withheld. With doors locked. With words whispered to others to ensure her isolation. With the slow and steady campaign of unmaking that only the cruel know how to perform. 

And yet she lived. 

Shamed. Fractured. 

But still herself. 

Even if she sometimes forgets who that is beneath the echoes. 

What made it worse—what carved the wound deeper than the scream, the slap, the shattered plate—was that no one defended her. 

Not one voice. 

Not one hand raised in protest. 

The only person who ever would have—her grandfather—was an ocean away. He, whose presence had once made her feel luminous. He, who called her strange mind a treasure, her silence a form of music. He would have come. She knows this now. He would have boarded a plane without hesitation, arrived like a storm, and taken her away from the rot. 

But she never told him. 

And for that, she still carries a quiet, festering hatred for herself. 

She tells herself she was trying to protect him. That she didn’t want to burden him, to unravel his peace with the truth of her suffering. But the deeper truth is simpler, crueler: she was ashamed. The abuse made her believe she deserved it. That it would be childish to complain. That love is conditional and defense must be earned. 

So she stayed. 

And others watched.

And those who saw—even in glimpses—did not rise in her defense. Instead, they justified it. Dismissed it. Some said she needed it. That she was finally shaping up. That the abuse was a forge and she, the dull iron being forced into something tolerable. 

She had always struggled in school—words slid off her mind like oil from glass. But now she was getting passable grades, so the screams must be working. 

She had always been “chunky”—their word, not hers—but now she was thinner. Hollow-eyed, but thinner. 

She had always gagged at certain textures, her autistic mind recoiling at the feel of cooked spinach or slimy asparagus. But now, she forced it down. Cried in silence. Choked when she was alone. And for this, they called her good. They said she was finally growing up. 

She had always been passionate about her drawings, her worlds of ink and shadow and myth. But now, the sketchbooks stayed closed. The characters remained caged in her mind. She had stopped sharing, stopped showing, stopped being. 

And so they said the house was peaceful. 

Because she had vanished into silence. 

Because she had withered into something palatable. 

So the abuse was deemed acceptable. Even praised. 

No one noticed that she stopped laughing. 

No one noticed that she flinched when footsteps neared. 

No one cared that her joy had been starved, her fire smothered. 

She had become a quiet girl with better grades and smaller meals. 

And that, to them, was a success story. 

She was not a perfect teenager. 

But no teenager is. 

She lied. She stole. She failed to do the things expected of her—laundry, homework, chores, simple conversations. Her body remained a house with all the lights flickering, her mind a storm with no shelter. 

She struggled. Every day. 

Her autism was still undiagnosed then, though it throbbed behind her eyes like a wound only she could feel. The world demanded she be normal while offering no instruction—only punishments when she wasn’t.

She lied because fear had become her first language. 

She stole because anger was the only thing she was allowed to feel. 

She disobeyed not to wound, but to survive. 

But none of that mattered. 

Even if someone had placed a name on her mind, had stamped it into paper and handed to the adults who were meant to care—the cruelty would have remained. Her abuser would have said it was an excuse. That she was lazy. That she was spoiled. Not simply exhausted. Not simply overwhelmed by a world that tore at her senses like broken glass. 

She was a child. 

They were the adults. 

And they should have done better. 

That is not an accusation. It is a fact. A truth as stark as frostbite. They should have seen her flailing and lifted her. They should have asked why instead of branding her a failure. 

Instead, they broke her. 

So thoroughly, so consistently, that even now—years later, with time and distance and diagnoses and a husband who loves her—she still flinches at kindness. Still hesitates to rest. Still panics when the dishes remain in the sink, heart thudding like she’s about to be struck. 

He has never raised his voice. 

But trauma doesn’t need proof to whisper its warnings. 

And the voice—that voice—is always there. 

It slithers beneath her medication. It lingers behind praise. It hisses in the quiet between chores, in the cold hum of the refrigerator at night, in the moment before sleep. 

You are worthless. 

You are stupid. 

You are ugly. 

You would be better gone. 

And sometimes, she believes it. Not because it’s true. But because it was spoken to her so often, by so many, that it etched itself into the walls of her skull. 

But here she is. 

Still breathing.

The voice has not won. 

Not yet. 

And even on the days she cannot speak back to it, even on the days she agrees with it in silence—she rises. She lives. She does the dishes. Or she doesn’t. She tries again the next day. 

And that is resistance. 

Not recovery. 

Not forgiveness. 

But resistance. 

She hates herself. 

Even now—especially now—after years have passed and the wounds are older, if not healed. 

She says the words quietly, sometimes not aloud, but with the kind of certainty others reserve for scripture. It is not a passing mood. It is marrow. It is ritual. I am worthless. Not for the reasons others might assume—but for all the ones that claw at her in the silence between trying and failing. 

She has no college degree. 

Dropped out three times. 

Each attempt a shipwreck she still sifts through in dreams. 

Her passions burn bright—sometimes blindingly so. But they do not pay rent. They do not build careers. She has a brilliant mind, yes—but only for what she loves. For everything else—forms, deadlines, spreadsheets, linear thought—her mind collapses like wet paper. 

Her autism is not a shame she carries. 

But the late diagnosis became a kind of theft. 

Time, opportunity, understanding—stolen before she even knew what was missing. 

Friendship is a maze. Romance a language spoken just beyond her hearing. She mimics. She masks. She studies social cues like ancient runes. 

And still, she is left out of the circle. 

She is always just outside—the window fogged, her hands pressed to the glass, watching others exist in a world that does not scrape at their skin. 

Of course, she believes others who struggle are worthy. 

She advocates. She uplifts. She comforts. 

But herself?

No. Not her. 

Her self-loathing is a black well with no bottom. 

Therapy helps. 

It gives her tools, names for storms, maps for the bad days. 

She believes in it. 

She encourages others toward it. 

But her own hatred remains. 

A shadow that wakes before she does. 

A voice that does not shout, but whispers. 

You are failing. 

You will always fail. 

You are not enough. You are too much. You are nothing at all. 

And no matter how many times she tries to plant flowers over that voice, it returns—choking the roots. 

She wants to love herself. 

She does. 

She wants to look in the mirror and feel warmth. 

She wants to finish a project and not see the imperfections first. 

She wants to belong—to something, somewhere, someone—without the constant sense that her presence is a tolerated inconvenience. 

But most days, she survives instead. 

And that, perhaps, is a quieter kind of heroism. 

One not sung about. One not celebrated. 

But real. 

And hers.Surviving in a world not built for her is a labor no one sees. 

It does not come with accolades. There are no medals for masking. No praise for pretending that the lights don’t hurt, that the crowds don’t drain, that the noise doesn’t tear at her temples like claws. 

Every day she wakes, already behind. 

Behind the rhythm. Behind the language. Behind the ease with which others move through their lives.

She watches neurotypicals with a strange awe, the way one watches birds fly—marveling at a freedom she cannot possess. How do they glide through small talk, brush off interruptions, plan the week, complete errands, return texts, smile and mean it? 

She must rehearse what they say effortlessly. 

She studies tone, posture, rhythm. 

She plays a character who looks like her and wears her name. 

She nods and smiles in conversations while her brain screams What did that mean? Were they joking? Should I laugh now? Is my face wrong again? 

She mirrors. She manages. She mimics humanity like an actor praying no one notices the lines are memorized, not felt. 

And it is exhausting. 

Masking is a full-time job that does not pay. It costs instead: energy, peace, identity. By nightfall, she is limp with effort. Her skin aches. Her thoughts are tangled. Her heart stutters not from fear, but from depletion. 

She often wonders: Do they know? 

Do the others realize what it takes for her to simply exist beside them? To sit in a café without fleeing, to answer a phone call without trembling, to laugh at the right time, not too loudly, not too softly? 

They call her high-functioning. 

As if that were a compliment. 

As if survival meant success. 

But the labor never ends. 

There are no breaks. No weekends. No relief. Even in joy, there is awareness. Even in safety, there is caution. Her life is a long corridor lit by flickering bulbs, never fully dark, never fully lit. 

She tries. 

My God, how she tries. 

She sets alarms for basic tasks: eat, shower, rest. 

She writes lists and loses them. 

She forgets bills, birthdays, appointments—and flays herself for each one. 

She panics when things change suddenly. She struggles to transition from one task to another. Noise makes her flinch. Repetition calms her. Eye contact hurts. Routines save her life.

And yet, she is told she is lazy. 

Told she is overreacting. 

Told she is fine because she makes it look fine. 

Told she is capable—look how smart you are—while the dishes pile up, and the appointments are missed, and the loneliness grows teeth. 

Because the world only believes in the struggle it can see. 

And hers is invisible. Intimate. Unending. 

But she survives. 

Again. 

And again. 

Not because it gets easier. 

But because she must. 

And in that brutal, silent labor—there is a strength no one ever taught her to name. She struggled with friendship. 

Not from lack of effort, but from abundance. 

She cared too much. That was always the accusation. 

Too intense. Too serious. Too attached. 

She remembered the way her friends would flinch when she showed up raw, honest, trembling with trust. She didn't know how to do things halfway. When she loved someone, she gave them all the cracked pieces of her soul and hoped they wouldn’t step too hard. 

But most did. 

Not out of malice. But because they were young. Because they didn’t know what to do with a friend whose pain showed up like bad weather. 

There was always something going on with her. 

Of course there was. 

Her home was a battlefield. 

Her body a cage. 

Her mind a maze of broken locks and alarms. 

And so, she talked about it. Sometimes too much. Sometimes at the wrong times. Sometimes when all they wanted was a joke, a flirtation, a song. And she—shivering from some new bruise, some new scream at home—offered truth instead.

They called her a bummer. A downer. A stormcloud in their sunlit chatter. 

And while she understood—God, how she understood—while she repeated to herself that teenagers are imperfect, irrational, selfish, and still learning—it didn’t erase the loneliness. 

It didn’t erase the empty table in the lunchroom. 

The way conversations hushed when she approached. 

The way birthday invitations stopped coming. 

The way group photos no longer included her. 

They weren’t cruel. 

They were just young. 

And she was not. 

Her trauma had made her ancient. A weary soul in a high school desk. She saw the world through cracks no one else could see. She was their age in body, but not in spirit. While they planned parties, she planned exit strategies. While they talked crushes, she calculated which of her family members might overdose next. 

She did not blame them. 

Not truly. 

But understanding did not warm her seat in the cafeteria. 

It did not stop her from crying in stairwells. 

It did not keep her from pretending to be sick on days she could not face their effortless joy. 

They wanted light. 

And she carried weather. 

She never learned how to shrink her heart down to something small and simple. She only ever knew how to love with the entire ache of her body. And for that, they turned away. 

So she sat alone. 

Again. 

And again. 

And told herself it was better that way. 

That loneliness was easier than being made to feel like an inconvenience in a room full of laughter. 

But even as she said it—she wanted nothing more than to be wanted. 

Not for being happy. 

Not for being easy. 

But for being herself.

She was jealous of her friends. 

Not for their looks. Not for their grades or their crushes or their clothes. But for the luxury of caring about those things. 

For the ease with which they moved through the world. Their minds clear of fear. She wanted—painfully—more than anything to be like them. 

To be able to go home and be a brat without fear. 

To slam a door and not cower. 

To roll her eyes at a parent and not end in a silence or blood or a door locked shut to the kitchen. 

She would listen to them whine about their parents taking their phones away, about unfair curfews, about not being allowed to dye their hair or stay out late. 

And though she would nod. Smile, even. She would hear the twisted thread in her chest. Because they were safe enough to complain. 

Safe enough to fight. 

Safe enough to push back. 

Safe enough to be a child. 

And she was not. 

She knew she wasn’t the only one. 

Not all of her friends had soft lives. 

Some of them had their own storms—secreted in bruises, whispered between bathroom stalls, left in shaky laughter. 

But even then. Even with the broken ones. She still felt separate. 

Because they wanted oblivion. To party and not feel. 

To scream and forget. 

To drown it in noise and music and strobe lights so loud she couldn’t hear her own mind. 

And she—she wanted understanding. 

She wanted to sit in the silence and ask why. 

She wanted to know their pain. Hold their hands in the dark and give it a name. Learn with them. Not be alone with it. 

But that kind of intimacy was too much for most people.

Too personal. Too raw. 

They wanted oblivion. 

She wanted connection. 

And so they drifted. Not because of cruelty. Not because of abandonment. But because of differences. 

She envied when they said, “God, my parents just care too much.” 

She wanted to scream at them, Good. They should. You deserve that. 

Teenagers should be allowed to be brats. 

They should be allowed to cry over homecoming dresses, scream over curfews, pout over chores. 

Because being a brat is the freedom to care about such things. 

And she had never been allowed that luxury. 

She did not want to take it from them. 

She wanted to give it to everyone. 

She wanted a world where teenagers were allowed to be flawed and messy and loud. Where pain was not a requirement for knowledge. Where no child had to bury their childhood just to survive. 

She was proud of how she survived. 

But God—how she wished she hadn’t had to. 

Recovery is not soft. 

It is not gentle. 

It does not bloom like spring. 

It claws. 

It peels. 

It burns before it heals. 

When she left—for real, when she had finally cut the cord, gone no contact, and left the house that had raised her only to chew on her bones—it did not feel like freedom. It felt like freefall. 

Her body, so long accustomed to the prelude of violence, could not understand safety. Her brain, still buzzing with the static of survival, could not rest. She flinched at kindness, misread silences, snapped at shadows. And worst of all—she hurt the people who loved her. 

She was violent.

Not always. 

But often enough that she remembers it now with shame. 

Erratic. Moody. Unpredictable. She did not mean to. But neither did it mean to either. Her moods swung without warning, her voice might raise when she meant to whisper. She accused where there was no cause, fell silent for days, only to return with demands for closeness she hadn’t earned. 

Her heart ached for connection. 

But her trauma only knew defense. 

And so she bled onto people who did not wound her. 

She didn’t want to. 

But wanting does not undo damage. 

Some friends left. 

Quietly. Kindly. 

Or all at once, in a rending of hurt that still tugs at her heart. And she does not blame them. But some stayed. 

One stayed. 

A., her longest and closest friend. The one who had known her through every stage, every breaking. The one who had seen her darkness and chosen to stay anyway. And to this person—she apologized. Not with grand speeches. Not with begging, or excuses. But with quiet truth. 

I was wrong. I was cruel. I was afraid. I am trying to be better. 

And A. did what so few had done before them. 

They forgave. 

Not blindly. Not without hurt. But with honesty. 

They chose to grow with her. 

To build something new on the cracks of the old. 

To call her out when needed, and call her in when she stumbled. 

Together, they built something strong. 

Recovery did not make her perfect. 

But it made her aware.

She catches herself now. She breathes before speaking. She names her panic before it becomes poison. She says thank you when others are patient, I’m sorry when she isn’t. She doesn’t say it as a reflex, but as a repair. 

The work is daily. 

The guilt does not leave. 

But neither does love. 

And in A., she saw what survival was supposed to bring her to—not just an escape, but a connection. Not just safety, but a silence where she could rest. 

They are older now. 

Both of them. 

Still learning, still growing. 

But growing together. 

And for her, that is a kind of miracle. 

And despite it all—despite the pain, the silence, the weight of a life lived in survival mode—she is not alone. She has friends who care. People who see her as not too much, but achingly, deeply, wonderfully alive. A., S. and L.—who stayed, and listened, and forgave her and chose her again. And her husband, who doesn’t just love her, but all the colors of her—bright and broken and trembling and unyielding. 

She’s learning. Slowly. Imperfectly. How to cope with her autism, and her anxiety, and her trauma. How to name what hurts without letting it consume her. How to feel joy without suspicion. How to rest. 

There will always be bad days. But now, there is also something else. Safety. Trust. A future.

By Salem Youngblood