Trigger Warning: This article may be a trigger for some people. For me, writing it was part of the healing process.
Rape is such a loaded word. It brings to mind images of incredible violence, women with huge nasty bruises on their faces, unable to sleep properly for weeks on end because of the nightmares. The types of things you see on Law and Order: SVU.
My ex-mother-in-law won’t even say the word. “Hurt,” she says, as in, “Did someone hurt her when she was young?” when her son told her that I was severely sexually repressed. (“No,” was his answer, “it was just the church.” We had been together about five years at that point.)
The fact is, rape doesn’t…
And the system doesn’t care
When my brother was 13 years old, he started huffing fumes out of aerosol cans in the garage. He was smoking cigarettes before high school and got caught breaking into a local gas station with a friend to steal alcohol in ninth grade.
By the time he was 18, Jax was hooked on heroin.
My mother spent countless hours trying to find someone who could help her son before he ended up on that road. She looked into every youth program she could possibly find, desperately hoping there was something out there that could steer him away from the claws…
I am very bad about offending people without meaning to.
It isn’t one of those big offenses that everyone likes to talk about — I am too careful to commit one of those. It’s usually just something I say that wouldn’t have offended me, yet I realize after it has come out of my mouth that it can so easily be construed in a way I didn’t mean.
There was the girl who was using the microphone I usually used one Sunday, when she was on stage and I wasn’t. “Oh, look, Laura’s using my mic,” I observed. And that…
People think I am insane.
I met Atlas when I was 18 years old, newly initiated into the world of drinking, cussing, and having sex.
He was tall, strong, much more of an adult than I was — and adorable. He had lived on his own for 3 years already; his parents had moved four states away when he was sixteen and he had stayed behind with his girlfriend, working full-time and then some, until his relationship fell apart and he finally left his home to move back in with his mom and the Wolf.
The first time he saw me, he thought I was…
We all need friends we can count on.
As a teen with a vague interest in numerology, I remember learning that the number three is the number of completion. While the Tarot interpretation is a bit more in-depth, we can think of the Three of Cups as the completion of the balance we worked so hard to achieve in the Two of Cups.
More than that, however, the Three of Cups is a card of happiness, playfulness, and frivolity. It depicts a group of people getting along, enjoying the fruits of their labor. …
It was an accident, so they say.
August 2020
He was so proud of that car. He had gotten a loan on it; it was the newest thing he had ever owned, only a year old. He had been so particular back when he would come to pick the kids up, changing Rain’s shoes and wiping the mud off Baby Li’s feet before putting them in.
He is particular about a lot of things. “I’m becoming more OCD,” he will later tell me.
He is a good driver, too. Atlas is never careless; in ten years he never even had so much as a close call when…
We can only move forward with balance and harmony.
No one is an island; we all need friendships and relationships to make it through the journey of life. Meaningful relationships help keep us centered, and offer us new insights and perspectives on both the world around us and our own experiences.
Any time we embark on a new path with our emotions, new relationships are in store — even if that simply means a new relationship with self.
Once you have taken those first steps onto a new path with your emotions, you can expect that your relationship with yourself, with others, or with the world at large will…
But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.
Like most of us, I’ve been hurt.
I know you’ve been hurt too —
yours is a hurt that grows sullen and serious.
Mine is a hurt that glows blue.
I know I can be so cold sometimes,
I know it seems I don’t have any feelings.
I get a blank look on my emotionless face
And don’t give you anything.
You know it’s a defense mechanism,
One that’s outdated and unhealthy.
I am afraid to put my love in your hands;
I can’t let you use it against me.
Everyone I’ve loved has left me;
when I’ve withheld my…
The story of a serial killer might hold a clue.
I asked Google the other day, “Why do people hide?” The answers it wanted to give me were disappointingly vague and predictable - largely, I suppose, because it was a vague and predictable question.
The real question is, “Why do you hide?” or maybe, “Why do I hide?”
Why does Bruce Wayne hide but not Joker? Why does Benjamin Barker hide in plain sight? Why do snakes hide in cool, dark places? Why do Aliens hide among humans?
The first serial killer I ever read about was the Happy Face Killer, so-called because he left smilies on the notes he…
And the cages they are kept in
June 2019
The sky is blushing when we walk out into the evening air. Atlas opens the gate, shaking the big green feed scoop full of rabbit pellets as he sidles inside the fence. The rabbits come running.
I sit on the edge of the porch and watch him. He is never so peaceful as he is at these times, the wind blowing the rabbits’ fur in tiny ripples around his feet, surrounded by the silence of creatures that even in large numbers never make a sound.
“Are you hungry?” he asks. He kneels down and shakes some pellets into…
Misty Moon
Writer, survivor, fledgling activist. Misty is the narrator inside my head. Buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mistymoon
