Dye Job 4: Purple, Black & Blue
How A Coin & Fringe Bra Literally Saved My Life
I don’t give specific trigger warnings very often. Except for things like being self-hating and suicidal in the aftermath of the most psychologically abusive, violent, and predatory relationship I’ve ever been in.1
Fortunately, Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, was just about to bwong me on the head and save my life in a way I never could have imagined in all my nineteen years.
Continued from:
—THE LURE OF BELLY DANCE
DYE JOB:
—Part 1: PINK, GOLD, BERRY BLUSH
—Part 2: PAINT IT BLACK
—Part 3: WINE, BLOOD-RED, TEAL
…Laurie leans toward me with her elbow on the step I’m sitting on to whisper, “Have you ever taken belly dancing?”
My eyebrows raise. “No. Why?”
She shrugs. “You just caught onto Polynesian so quickly that I thought maybe…”
I shake my head. “I’ve never even seen a belly dancer.”
“Well, you should take lessons. You’re a really great dancer. This style seems so natural to you, and there are so many similarities to belly dancing. You have wonderful hips. It’s like they were made for it…”
Made for it…
Made for it…
August 1992
19 years old
I don’t know which of my parents came into the bathroom that day to tackle me out of screaming. I don’t remember what happened after all that glass shattered around me.
I only know that I went to the hair dresser the next day and got all those cursed, black-dyed curls whacked off to above the shoulders. Then my mom sent me to see a shrink. Unfortunately, it didn’t do me any good, because he listened to me for one hour, diagnosed me with “the same chemical imbalance my mom had” (read: Hysterical Female Syndrome), and put me on Prozac.
Although everybody’s “favorite wonder-drug” brightened colors and my attitude for the first two weeks, after that it emotionally flatlined me while convincing me that my life was “fine…just fine” and that I didn’t need any more help.
I was on it for four years.
He didn’t check up on me once.
Even the therapist I saw for a little while didn’t do me any good, because this was not trauma therapy. This was just run-of-the-mill talk therapy, and it’s not like she could help me if I didn’t talk about the violent and abusive incidents that had transformed me over a few months from a vibrant, expressive, budding stage performer into a paranoid, self-loathing, suicidal wreck, vacillating between flat-affect numbness and volatile explosions, on the verge of becoming an overnight alcoholic.
Of course, it’s not like I could talk about what had caused it if I couldn’t remember it, because the aftermath of that broken mirror wasn’t the only lost memory.
From somewhere around March until September of 1992, my mind kept extracting files and hiding them in a secret hard-drive I didn’t know I had. Other memories, like my first night at Martin’s house and that time he asked if I “wanted to try being tied up” were…
Edited. Warped. Redacted.
Yet it was all still in there. Everything he’d ever said to me, done to me, convinced me of. The body really does keep the score, and the impact of this abuse ran in the background like a virus. It piggybacked my oldest wounds and toxic psychological ruts, mushrooming them and arming them with spikes. It corrupted my every decision, emotion, and thought, particularly the thoughts I had about myself.
All throughout college and for about a year afterwards, I remained clueless of this fact. I only got the hidden memories back in an additionally traumatizing way—“coincidentally,” two weeks after I went off Prozac.
Huh.
Fascinating…
I also didn’t know that I had done this before with other violent and predatory memories. I was very, very young.2
All those holes in my memory left me meandering around in a clueless fog, often uncertain what month it was without looking at a calendar. My ability to genuinely smile and laugh, or to cry had been vaporized, but I didn’t know how or when. I didn’t recognize the person I saw in the mirror or in photographs. I had become some haunted, hollow-eyed bag of bones dragging the remains of myself around, baffled by my inexplicable desire to off myself. 3
September 1992
A few weeks after I shattered my parents’ mirror…
After the day’s classes finish, I come back to the on-campus apartment I share with three of my other Theater Department buddies. I drop my dance bag on the floor, slough off my shoes, and flop onto the couch next to Julia, wiped out.
She’s a Costuming Major, so it’s no surprise that she’s hand-sewing. I push my chin out at her project. “What are you working on?”
“A Halloween costume.” She holds up a black bra by its elastic straps. She’s sewn black fringe onto the cups, as well a row of silver coins and the second row she’s adding now. She gives the thing a shake, making the fringe shiver and the coins tinkle against each other. “Renee wants to go as a belly dancer.”
Bing.
I blink hard and stare.
Belly dancer…
…you should take lessons and then take my spot at the Greek restaurant…
I lift my head and let it lower. “That’s cool.”
I wonder what Martin would think of me dancing in a costume like that. When we first started dating, he used to always ask me to dance sexy for him in his living room. In his bedroom. On top of him. Underneath him.
I haven’t done that in…
Whuff. I don’t know how long. Ages.
He just gave me a pretty little ring. It’s only a simple blue stone—his favorite color. He was getting gas and saw it in one of those birthstone racks. He just had to buy it for me. "Until I can afford the real thing," he said. I couldn't believe it. As the summer was ending, I had started to think he didn't love me anymore. I could have sworn he was about to dump me, but then he put that ring on my finger.
Of course I had to say yes.
Of course, I’ve barely seen him all week so…
He keeps saying he’s busy with the start of school. So am I, yet I would sleep over with him every night like we did all last school year if he wanted me to. He’s hardly invited me over to his new house, and he’s only been to my place once.4
My roommates did NOT like him.
I didn’t like him much that night either. He was totally wasted, and really loud. Except when he quick bent me over the back of the couch after everybody else went to bed. 5
Four days later…
As the sun comes up, I start to stir. So does Julia. The bunkbed jostles and creaks as she hops down from the top bunk and hovers over me. Instead of her usual morning greeting, she’s staring at me with huge eyes.
“Uh…hey…?” I say. Sheesh, did I fart in my sleep all night, or what?
“Hey.” After a second, she asks, “So…do you remember what you were dreaming about last night?”
“Dreaming?”
“Yeah. You woke everybody up screaming bloody murder.”
I bolt upright, heart racing. “Wh-what? I did?” At her tight-lipped nod, I say, “Oh, my God.” I woke up…everybody? Drawing my knees up to my chin, I hug them with my hands clenched hard around my sweatpants. “Jules, I am soooo…so sorry.”
She nods again, her eyes flooding with concern.
All I can do is gawk at her, blinking stupidly as I wrack my brains. Because I have absolutely no memory of that. “Wha—I mean…did I, like…say something or…?”
She’s holding onto her ribs really tight and her chin is ducked down, hedgy as she quotes in a hushed screech, “‘He’s gonna kill me!’ Over and over you kept screaming that.”
My whole body goes stiff with horror. I can barely breathe. “Really?” I squeak.
Another nod. “You seriously don’t remember any of that?”
All I can do is shake my head. Because whatever happened, it is just…
Gone6
October 1992
Two weeks later…
I lie on the living room floor with my feet planted on the rug, my knees bent, my gaze fixed on the white popcorn ceiling. From the stereo, my roommate’s Pretty Woman soundtrack plays.
“Make believing
We’re together
That I’m sheltered
By your heart
But in and outside
I turn to water
Like a teardrop
In your palm…”
Yes, exactly. Hot tears leak out my eyes and run down my temples. He doesn’t want me anymore. He’s fallen in love with someone else.7
With Elissa Ainsley, of all people. How did he even meet a girl I went to church with the whole time I was growing up? Now the love of my life wants her. Wants to marry her already. His eyes were so swoony as he gushed, “She’s just such a good girl.” 8
That’s true. Unlike me. He doesn’t have to say it.
Loud-mouth.
Slut.
Unladylike.
Whore.
Striding, swearing, boom-laughing tomboy.
Skank.
Al-Triple-EXXX.
Isn’t that what they all called me?
Hart the Tart.9
When they taped that condom onto my locker in eighth grade and told everybody all those lies about me, as well as some very secret truths they’d lured out of me “in the confidence of friends.”
I was still a virgin then. Two years before I finally did it.
But Elissa wants to wait until marriage. Of course she does. I always liked her. She’s worthy of being liked. Worthy of marrying. Not just banging and dumping like a piece of rotten, smelly trash. That’s how he looked at me. On and off all summer. And spring. And even that one time at the end of winter. That first time. When he shoved me off his lap in disgust.
You’re not worthy of being loved when you act like this! 10
Crying.
I was crying that day. That’s what turned him off. You need to put on that stiff upper lip and pull yourself up by your bootstraps!
But I’m the Sentimental Slob. Always have been. Just a blubbery, whiny crybaby. And a thunder-voiced, thunder-footed, ox-clomping, boot-tromping jock.
And a slut who spread her filthy, sinful thighs when she was fifteen.
That’s why everybody hates you.
You’re going to Hell.
Unlike Elissa. The good girl. His angel. She’s just a bit older than I am. Was Valedictorian at her school, too, but a very different type of Valedictorian.
Not a Vale-dick-whore-ian.11
Why don’t you just hurry up with that going to Hell thing, instead of dragging the whole world down with you? Everybody would be so much happier if they never had to deal with you again.
Isn’t that what they said? And now Martin has found a girl he can actually love.
Only two weeks ago, he gave me that cute little convenience store ring. I wonder if Elissa has the real thing.
The lock at the front door clicks open. Julia and Aimee come in. Chatting and laughing. See me down there on the floor. Their voices stop.
The speakers sing my mood.
“It must have been love
But it’s over now
It must have been good
But I lost it somehow.”
From the corner of my eye, I see them exchange glances. Not like they haven’t found me down here, inconsolably blue, doing the same thing for the past three days since he dumped me. The door shuts. They retreat to Aimee’s bedroom together. Leave me lying there in my misery.12
The song ends.
I stab a finger at the BACK button. The drum kicks out. Boom. Pak! Boom-boom, pak! Boom. Pak…
Another few tears slide down my face. After all, my life isn’t a Hollywood movie, so I don’t expect the sweetheart Vale-dick-whores to get happy endings, no matter how well we clean up on the outside. 13
October 1992
Two weeks later...
I come out from the bedroom I share with Julia to find her and Renee in the bathroom. Renee has come over to try on her Halloween costume.
“Wow,” I say, taking her in head-to-toe. “You look great!”
She beams, turning this way and that to admire the effect in the mirror. Every one of her curves is accentuated by the embellished bra and the rows of silver coins with black fringe around her hips.
She tries out a few moves. My eyes pop open to see the effect. The fringe swishes. The coins jingle. The I-Dream-of-Jeanie pants are slitted at the side-seams, joined by more beads at her knee. Little flashes of her thigh peek through as she lifts one side of her butt up and down. The fringe and coins fly and then pop.
“Oh, Julia,” she gushes and jumps in for a hug. “It’s so perfect!”
“It really is, Jules,” I chime in.
My roommate grins. “I’m so glad you like it.”
Renee kisses her cheek, then goes back to shaking all the adornments in the mirror. “I love it!”
So do I.
Bing!
That faerie godmother wand jabs me between the eyes, once again speaking in Laurie’s voice from the day we sat on the backstage stairs, waiting for our turn to rehearse that Polynesian dance.
You’re a really great dancer. This style seems so natural to you… It’s like your hips were made for it…
Made for it…
Made for it…
I glance down. My hips aren’t nearly as curvy as Renee’s, and I don’t have half her boobs. But the wand jabs me again.
DO IT. ASK HER NOW.
“So…” I hedge closer to Renee. “Do you actually know how to belly dance?”
She flip-flops her hand back and forth, then turns her back to Julia, flinging her big, thick curls over the front of her shoulder. Her hair practically glows red-violet, a shade as gorgeous and bold as she is. “Undo me?”
When her everything springs free of the bra, Julia plops down on the toilet seat without batting an eye. My gaze snaps away as my cheeks burst aflame. We’re all Theater Majors here, but I’m still not used to the way everybody strips down in front of everybody else, everywhere, no matter if they use the same bathroom or not.
Renee says to me, “I took some lessons over the summer, but my schedule is just insane this semester. So I had to drop.”
“That’s too bad,” I mumble with my gaze riveted to the floor.
The hip belt jingles onto the counter and the genie-pants hit the tiles. There in all her glory, wearing nothing but a lacy purple thong—the kind of underwear I have only ever heard of, but never seen—Renee reaches for her jeans and wriggles into them. “I really loved that class, though. It was so fun. So sexy. Mmmm… Doug sure liked it.” With a wink at Julia, she gives another little jiggle of her hips, then pulls her jeans all the way up.
Julia’s eyes glimmer with mischief. “I bet he did.”
“He didn’t even let me finish the dance before he was on me.”
Well. Obviously Renee is not a “good girl,” saving herself for marriage either. She’s actually the kind of girl—the kind of woman I’d always wanted to be but never had the guts. Her strides are bold, her footsteps not delicate at all. It’s like a cross between a jock-walk and a runway model stride, but with…
Well, with those hips.
They tick and tock in a way that would get any female branded a slut in my hometown. Don’t dare walk up the aisle to Communion like that either. Her hips roll with an ease that speaks to all the overheated, juicy, vigorous things she does with them, yet it’s not at all for show. That’s just how she moves. She’s confident. Radiant. Unapologetically alluring.
There is power in that. You don’t mess with a woman like Renee.
Bing!
…you should take lessons…
I put my gaze back on the floor.
Seriously. Do NOT ignore me.
My eyes fly heaven-ward, and I huff at the bippity-boppity wand in my mind. It started poking me on those stairs with Laurie during Twelfth Night. Then there was the flowy Star skirt and crop tops I couldn’t get enough of all summer. Now it’s these belly-jingles, and the Muse of Dance just will not let me be. All right, already! I get it! I’ll ask her. Sheesh!
Renee puts on something I’ve only ever seen in movies—a lacy bra that is part of a matched set with her thong. Now I unhesitantly scan her from the corners of my eyes.
All my panties are cotton, full-butt briefs, and my bras are either cotton or unadorned peach satin. Utilitarian. Pretty much the same kind I got when I was thirteen. I wonder if they make fancy matched sets in my size. I don’t know if I could ever wear a thong, but…I really like that lace. And the rich color. Such a regal, vibrant purple. And the way it frames her body instead of just keeping things…
Properly in place.
Her bra is anything but proper. Neither is the belly dance costume.
My gaze falls onto the jingles and fringe again. For sure I would love to wear something like that. It is just heavenly. And so fun!
As I salivate over the costume, a bag of bippity wallops me upside the head, showering me with sequins and tinkling coins. The veil of shadows and suffocating mist that I’ve been wearing for the better part of a year disintegrates as the glitter of inspiration rains down on me. It feels strangely akin to waking up from a very long, very tangled fever-dream.14
That’s when I remember.
Even as a kid, I’d never been fully sold on that whole Hell-and-Damnation thing. Because religion had lost its grip on me around seven years old when I asked that philosophical question that got me in trouble. Okay, really, the trouble came from my logical finger-poking into the holes of contradictory teachings and muddy, ambiguous arguments that only became louder, not clearer, with every question I leveled at my Catechism teacher. Finally, the frustrated bark silenced me, and deemed the entire topic off-limits.
That was pretty much it for me and religion.
Even at my forced and grudging Confirmation when I was seventeen, I’d had quite the chat with God as my mouth mumbled a bunch of promises I had no intention of keeping. God told me that was okay. “I already knew that about you, love.”
I think sometimes God likes to wear tumbles of red-violet hair and a mischievous smile.
Maybe even a coin-and-fringe bra.
Sacrilege, I know.
When I remember all that, it’s like slamming the lid shut on a whole reeking trunk full of crap that other people have tried all my life to make me wear.
Suffocating corsets of guilt.
Chafing, ten-ton chastity belts of shame.
Choke-chains and muzzles. Underwear a-drip with menstrual blood, balled up and shoved down my throat to silence me. Shackles hobbling my steps. Leashes to keep me pulled up short from my full self. Biting leather cinched tight around my wrists to keep me from grabbing my life in my own damned hands.
Damned?
How about damned right!
I guess if I’m wrong, Renee and I will be dancing Down South together, showing risqué amounts of skin, bedecked in jingles, jangles, and sparkly spangles. We’ll make toasts with blood-red wine and dark chocolate, alongside all the rest of we sluts, sinners, profane trompers, and middle-finger flashers.
As for everybody who’s ever told me that they wished I’d speed along that trip to Hell so the world doesn’t have to put up with me anymore?
They know where they can stick it, because I’m not going anywhere.
Actually, no.
That’s inaccurate.
Jaw hard, eyes glinting, I lean against the doorframe, tracing infinities with a toe across the metal divider between the bathroom and the hallway in which I lurk. “So, uh…” My gaze lifts to take in the final glimpse of Renee’s gorgeous torso before she pulls on her tank top. “Where did you take these lessons?”
Her head pops free of the shirt and then snaps toward me. Her curls swish over one eye, adding mischief to her arrow-sharp gaze. Her lips curve into a smirk. Her eyebrows flash twice.
One of mine lifts as I mirror her smirk, because I already know where I’m headed and what I’m about to do when I get there.
Post. Script.
A couple days after Christmas, I return to campus because I have an audition to prepare for. It’s not with the Theater Department. It’s at that Greek restaurant Laurie told me about. I’m supposed to come in and try out alongside one of their old dancers who will be performing for a special New Year’s Eve show.
New Year’s Eve…
Bing!
As I traverse the silent halls of another holiday-emptied dorm and once again enter my roommate-free bedroom, I can’t help being struck by another image.
Fucking Nick Berenger.
Take that as a verb; take it as a glorious, complimentary adjective; take it as the benediction upon his name that it is, I casually dial a few digits. The voice that greets me is enthusiastic. His rich, warm laughter rolls through my phone’s receiver like balm on festering wounds. It lures me back into life’s pleasures. Like the wonders of thick, black hair and kind, brown eyes. “Remember what we did last year right around this time?” I ask him.
“Oh, yeah. That was fun.”
“Interested in giving me the advanced course?”
“Hell yes. Come over.”
So I did.
And so. Good Saint Nicky refreshed all the lessons he had taught me, as well as some things that had been beyond me the first time. He reminded me how my body moved when it was liberated from fear and shame. He reminded me what kind of salty-sweetness I need for true and complete satisfaction.
Twined up in his arms, in his sheets, in his sweat and searing kisses, I remembered what my own heartbeat felt like. Nick was my friend, so I remembered what it was like to trust a man again. To enjoy the harmony of my laughter mingling with his, and to feel nothing but yes, yes, YES!
HELL YES.
While I was at it, I introduced him to a few things that belly dancers can do to the male body while up there on top of it with raucous music driving us.
Okay, so maybe girls like me don’t get Hollywood-happy endings with princes riding to the rescue, umbrellas unsheathed. Maybe we don’t get genuine marriage proposals from good ole country boys who want to sweep us off to log cabins in the far-off woods and have babies and grand-babies and dogs and cats with us until we’re old and gray.
Maybe we really don’t want any of that anyway.
Because maybe girls like me get other things far better suited to us.
Like wonderful hips. Powerful strides. Mischievous eyebrows. And souls made from music and fire.
UP NEXT: BABY BELLA DANCER - My first belly dance class
This tale has been a side-deviation from my other much more SFW arts & nature publication. If you want to see me get my first nudges to take belly dancing, watch me try on my own first costume, audition at that Greek restaurant on New Year’s Eve, and then blow on those embers until dancing became a career that took me around the world, you’ll have to cruise over here to the DanceStory Section of:
© 2020 Hartebeast
RELATED POSTS
A Dance of Enticement:
Shadow Meets Bonfire
Damsel To Dangerous
In case you don’t know who Nick Fucking Berenger is:
Dye Job 1: Pink, Gold, Berry Blush
Obviously I’m not a mental health practitioner. I only live with the crap, and try my best to deal with it and heal. As such, especially if it’s the super-bad place, I’m not the person to ask about this stuff.
These people are:
988 SUICIDE & CRISIS HOTLINE
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HOTLINE
RAINN - NATIONAL SEXUAL ASSAULT HOTLINE
One of the best books I have ever read in my life: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma
Don't want to read the book? Here's the basic premise of what trauma does to the body and why talking about it, even in therapy, so often doesn't solve the problems: Short Version. Or Long Version by the author himself
A love-letter to my 19-year-old self: Darling, you are approaching the end of the Devaluation Phase with a violent, abusive predator. The ground beneath your feet is giving off the warning tremors. You’re about to progress into The Discard. That’s all it is. It’ll be okay. In fact, when it hurls a wrecking ball through your world, this discard will become—and will remain until the day you die—one of the best things that has ever happened in your entire life. I promise. You’re simply caught in the web of an abuser and you don’t know it:
Manipulation & Sabotage Tactics of Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Psychopaths
Why your boundaries are not welcome in an abusive relationship
If you missed DYE JOB: PART 2 and PART 3, there are more resources at the end of those posts. Because there are just sooo, so many pieces to this.
The booty-calls? That fifty-cent little ring? The intermittent phone calls and the fact that he still remembers to tell you “I love you” - sometimes? This is all the damaging tactic of Bread-Crumbing to keep the old supply hooked (that’s you, my love) while test-driving a new (hopefully “better”) source of supply. You don’t know that yet. But you will. Very soon.
The Narcissistic Discard - The traumatic event that I praise and give thanks for every moment of every day. It undoubtedly saved my life as much as the awesome combination of belly dance and martial arts did.
Why predators and abusers won’t let you go - what happened to me while I was being downgraded from the “faulty, malfunctioning” primary source of supply into the secondary backup tier for when he was feeling lonely, and especially when he was horny because his new primary wouldn’t give him sex until he married her.
Hoovering - as in…a Hoover vacuum cleaner. You are Dobby with a sock. You’ve gotten free! But then…vwooooooooooop! You get sucked back in. You have just been Hoovered. This will go on for me until flippin’ February when I finally did something that made him decide I wasn’t worth the trouble of tangling with anymore. Rest assured, I’ll tell you that tale someday. Of course, he even used my dad to try to suck me back in a decade later but:
HELL NO. Going No Contact.
Oh, darling, you’ve just been snared in the web of abuse tactics known as Triangulation. Run. Run awaaaaay!
Slut-Shaming - another form of abuse.
Verbal & Emotional Abuse - the kinds of things abusers say that gradually erode…everything. (And no. It doesn’t only happen to females.)
“Sentimental. Slutty. Thunder-voiced, thunder-footed, ox-clomping, boot-tromping jock. Vale-dick-whorian.” In other words… an emotionally expressive, intelligent nerd and driven professional athlete with a completely liberated and enthusiastic sexual charge. 🤘BOOM.🤘 Don’t ever lose this list of traits, darling. In fact, do it more. These are some of the things that will inoculate you from being predator bait. RAWR and shit.
Supertraits - Beyond Empathy and Codependence in Survivors of Pathological Abuse
The profile of the conscienceless predator’s preferred prey - why it’s often not someone who starts out as the codependent, cowering doormat. Sandra L. Brown M.A and the Institute for Relational Harm Reduction.
The chemical dependency and withdrawal symptoms that cause a discarded source of supply to crash like going cold-turkey from any addictive drug.
Information Mining - how your hopes, dreams, fears, past traumas, and insecurities are gathered during Love-Bombing and remembered for later use as ammunition during the Devaluation and Discard Phases. Pretty soon, you may find yourself weaponizing them against yourself, using the very language your abuser hurled on you, but with far greater damage. You wind up doing their work for them while they kick back and leer. Oh. And while they hunt for new “better” sources of supply because you have become a malfunctioning piece of machinery that needs to be replaced. You may also need to be destroyed on the way to the Dumpster if you are a great enough threat.
And of course, The Debate. Personally, I like the word compassion better than sympathy. Remember that list of Supertraits that make me a tasty snack for predators? Remember how high Conscientiousness and Cooperation rank for me? Plus, I’m a fiction writer, and to write a good villain, you really do need to understand things from their perspective so this is something I’m practiced in doing. Every conscienceless predator I’ve ever tangled up with has been made that way by severe trauma, therefore, The Debate is one I consider a great deal while writing about this stuff. Doesn’t mean any abusive actions are excusable or that I am willing to engage at close range ever again. But the scientific/neurological understanding of these conditions, and human compassion… those are very important parts of my healing.
The dances I’ve made about this subject:
Ice Age - to Winter by Tori Amos
Demolition - to Mother also by Tori Amos
Dance With Darkness - to Isaac by Madonna
**Let it be known that I have never dated or been abused by somebody named Martin Burns, whose buddies all called him Burnsey. I named him that because he is my Martin Burney and yes, he did burn down my everything, complete with a hair-raising, terror-invoking song that is my Berlioz. Neither have I ever been discarded for and triangulated against a church-friend named Elissa Ainsley, or been inspired to take a dance class by somebody named Renee. So that makes this a work of fiction.
Based on episodes of my life that are not.
© 2020 Hartebeast
It’s so interesting how the universe continues to subtlety nudge us in the direction we need to go, even when we ignore or resist the first few nudges.
Your story is equal parts harrowing and beautiful and as usual — I was struck numerous times by just how well you describe both your interior world and the external world.