Open Thoughts

  Sometimes a town feels different without knowing why. The streets are the same. The buildings haven’t moved. The routines still happen—coffee is poured, doors open, cars pass by—but something is quieter than it used to be. Conversations trail off sooner. Laughter feels hesitant. There’s a shared pause in the air that no one quite names. Someone is gone. Not just someone important to their family or close friends—but someone whose presence reached farther than that. The kind of person whose absence doesn’t stay contained. It spills into everyday life. It settles into familiar places. It leaves a space where something warm and steady used to be. In towns like this, loss doesn’t belong to one household. It belongs to everyone, a little bit. People feel it at the grocery store, in passing conversations, in moments where they expect to see a familiar face and don’t. Even those who didn’t know him well feel the shift. That’s how you know a life mattered—when its absence rearranges the ...

 Sometimes I watch them—my baby nephew, my little sister—and I think, God, how beautiful it is to be so new to the world. Their laughter comes so easily. Their shoulders don’t know how to tense yet. Their eyes don’t scan for danger in every room. They don’t carry the heaviness I do, and I pray—honestly, I pray every day—that they never have to. It’s a strange kind of ache, loving someone that soft when you’ve lived through things that hard. Sometimes I catch myself just staring at them, memorizing how light they still are. How their smiles reach all the way to their eyes. How they can fall asleep without worrying if the door is locked or if someone will raise their voice tomorrow. How they are still untouched. They may still be tiny, but I still worry. And I think about myself at that age. I wonder when exactly it changed for me—when the air got heavier, when safety became a thing I had to chase instead of just feel. There’s grief in that. But there’s also this overwhelming, te...

Diary Entry: I Finally Said No Yesterday, something small happened. So small, in fact, that I might’ve missed its significance if I hadn’t paused long enough to feel the quiet tremble in my chest afterward. Someone reached in for a hug — the kind I’ve accepted countless times before, even when everything inside me screamed no . Not because I disliked the person. Not because I’m cold or dramatic or broken. Just because… there are certain types of closeness that don’t feel safe in my body anymore. And yesterday, for the first time, I didn’t smile through it or freeze or fold myself up into tolerance. I simply stepped back, gently, and said, “No, thank you.” That moment — so brief — carries the weight of years. Because for a long time, I didn’t have the words. I didn’t have the right to say no. I didn’t even know I could . Touch became a performance, a way to keep peace, to seem fine, to convince myself I was "over it." After the trauma— I learned quickly that people don’t alway...

  Diary Entry — 10 Years Later It’s been ten years since I was 17 — a decade since the darkness touched my life in ways I never thought possible. The pain he left wasn’t just on my skin, marked by crescent moons and bruises, some deep enough to bleed; it settled deep inside me, in places unseen and often unspoken. Long sleeves and hoodies to hide the damage he once thrust upon me. Even in the heat of the dead of summer. To forget about it in hopes it never truly happened. He hurt me in front of others, turning moments that should have been safe into nightmares. The game he called  “fire truck”  wasn’t a game at all — “you can’t say stop. Fire trucks don’t stop at red lights”: it was a theft of my voice, my trust, my sense of self. My clothes torn, my spirit shattered, held down by someone I once trusted… someone I once loved. When he had his car accident- he blamed me for a life lost, the weight of guilt threatened to bury me. My mother asked that I show to his ‘get well ...

June 26th, 2025 It’s been almost six years, and I still can’t breathe when I smell those Black Ice air fresheners. They’re everywhere — gas stations, the thought of them, sometimes even someone’s rearview mirror — and every time, it hits me like a sucker punch. August 2019. The bed of a 2019 Ram. The ridges digging into my back like teeth. I was 20 years old, wearing that orange Florida t-shirt — the one I never wore again. I remember the heat first. The sweat, thick and constant, sticking fabric to my skin. His grunts felt louder than anything, like they echoed inside my skull. My panic didn’t look like screaming or fighting — it looked like freezing. Going still. Going somewhere else. I had suggested it, I think. Losing my virginity, I mean. I was young, naive, and thought I should want it. I thought it would be some kind of step I had to take. So, when I first mentioned it, it was my voice, my words, my idea. But as soon as it started happening, I changed my mind. I said no. I wa...

I have trauma.  Who doesn't?  I have trauma from physical abuse when I was 17 years old.  I have trauma from sexual assault when I was 20 years old. I mentioned before that this 'blog' is like an open diary for me. Why don't I treat it like one and spill out my trauma?  I'm not shy in speaking of it. Nobody should be.  So why shouldn't I share it with the, maybe, one or two people who may ever come across this?  And if it reaches more one day, I hold hope that it resonates with people and they know not to shy away from their trauma and that it encourages them to speak freely. Here is to my next entry, in diary form. ❤