1. I’m trying to live inside my body for the first time. If my body were a building, it would have boarded windows, leaky pipes, collapsing beams, poking wires, graffiti. I’ve been hiding at the top, a run-down attic inside my mind. For the first time now, I’m flicking the lights on the rest of the floors. 2. My friend and I take walks around the neighborhood where I grew up. I don’t live here anymore. I’ve moved a thousand and two miles away, doorstep to doorstep. No family lives within a few hundred miles. But when I visit, this friend and I always walk together. Our friendship is one of motion. I like it this way, our shoulders bumping on narrow sections of sidewalk, facing out. She and I against the world. 3. She was raped at knifepoint many years ago. This is something I know about her, like a birthday or a favorite song. It happened before I knew her, when she was nineteen, living alone in her first apartment in this neighborhood. She knew the rapist. The rapist lingered outside her apartment. The rapist followed her inside. The rapist stayed afterward to take care of her. The … Continue reading When We Say No