Dear Reader,

When I was twenty-four years old, I lived in Florida with my abuser. I had already been in and out of ER rooms and shelters. I was afraid of my abuser, and more afraid of leaving him. But one day, I packed a backpack, swallowed a handful of whatever I could find, said goodbye to my belongings, and ran.

When you have little power, you learn to unearth power from the unlikeliest spaces. Almost twenty years ago, my geography had no anchor. “Homeless” doesn’t tell my whole story. But despite my lack, I sifted comfort from my anonymity. I floated. I hovered. I breached underground spaces without acknowledging my complicity in those spaces because I thought I was no one.

I would hang out in dance clubs late at night and dance and drink. I’d go to sex shops to buy whippets and fog my brain out before crashing to sleep in some dreary motel.

In my imagination, I was anthropologist and shaman. I brought light to these spaces as witness. I created taxonomies to collect these spaces. I caught them in nets and killing jars. Their hard bodies pinned in the glass boxes of my aura. Sometimes I want to vanquish them. Sometimes I burn sage. Sometimes I go all fury and feral and break all the glass.

These days, I make sure I don’t drink too much because under too much pressure my mind goes back to those times when I was the target. I have broken several glass coffee tables and many collections of glassware. In my mind, in those over-saturated drunken rages, I’m still getting beat.

Sometimes I write, and more rarely, speak about these spaces. It’s not easy to write or talk about these spaces. I don’t do it to confess.

At times, I’ve felt isolated and alienated because of my past. At times, my past has been a fortress—preventing me from experiencing the joys of community—because so much of my past contains social taboos. And though it didn’t then—because I didn’t have it then—community means everything to me.

The anonymity I gained from leaving my abuser had its power as well as its existential unbuttoning. I sought humid places so my lungs had some grit to inhale—so that I could be weighed down by something.

During this time, I wrote obsessively. I would spend hours filling notebooks with random words. I scrubbed my skull with tether-less words and then wrung out the sponge until the language just wouldn’t come anymore. I lost all my context.

Grace, in her many forms, came to me, and not without a geometrically-challenging journey. Some might say I was saved, spared, rescued, redeemed, or freed. I don’t like the friction of these words. Saying these words is like chewing on the fuzz of a vegetable gone bad. Is it because they imply my lack of agency? Is it because they frame those spaces as decidedly abject? Or is it because those words invoke an overwrought cliché? Girl saved. Girl needed saving.

I am still a ghost-body in those spaces. Some strange elegance haunts those stony landscapes in the folds of my mind. I like to think I am here because of the moon’s orbit. Waves fold through the sea in infinite ripples that echo, vibrate, trespass, and shape-shift with the force of what is above, below, and beside.

My past is sutured, selvaged, clustered, and knotted to my selfhood. Power shifts like the waves shift the sea. I have found power in the communities I gather with—a place where committed people braid optimism and hope with language and action. And this braid, this braid is our joy. And for that joy, I have the privilege of trading my anonymity. Here I am, skipping a rock across the waters.

I dedicate this to the women who cannot tell their story.