Everyone's chest is a living room wall with awkwardly placed photographs hiding fist-sized holes - Andrea Gibson

I’ve spent half of my life not knowing the difference between killing myself and fighting back. What if I don’t want healing
as much as I want justice? What if I don’t care if justice looks exactly like revenge? Do you think I don’t know that I can’t want revenge without strapping the bomb to my own chest? That’s how the dominoes of trauma fall. You become just another thing about to detonate.

We have all fought for our lives
more than we know,
survived our own questions.

Next time I will know it’s normal to have a hard time breathing when you shake the dust. We make everything so complicated. Sometimes, the message in the bottle is “Don’t drink so much — there’s too much Novocaine in our wisdom teeth already.