#context: my older brother made this in early elementary school. i think its made from applesauce

[tiktaaliker]

a legend returns....

[troop-scoop]

Youth I

Chapter One -  Pilot

Word count: 2k

Series Summary: On a family trip to your dad’s home town of Hawkins, Indiana, you make a series of decisions that result in you ending up in the year 1983 with more questions than there are answers presently available. 

Pairing: Steve Harrington x Female Reader ( slow burn ) 

Chapter Summary: You go through what’s become your new ‘normal’ at Hawkins High School

⟛⟛

Nothing about your current situation was settling right in your stomach. There were no answers as to how you got here, and you didn’t have any questions that could easily be answered. A series of unfortunate events resulted in the attitude you carried. You used to be sweet, all smiles and laughter unless someone did something to make you upset.

What happened to that girl? The girl who grew up never experiencing fear to the point where it worried her parents and made teachers concerned because she’d climb so high on the playground that if you fell, you’d surely break something.

You’d climbed so high on something, and you fell into this situation, and something did break. Your bravery, your fearlessness, nothing physical, but those two things were shattered, and your ego bruised.

Nothing was like what you were used to. To you, everything in this school hallway was dated. The fashion, the haircuts, the textbooks, and the tech.

The stereotypes.

“L/n!”

You shook your head, already knowing whose voice that was. A teenage boy who fit the typical ‘jock’ stereotype that everyone knew. The kid who hated his small town, he got around, played a sport his father probably hated, who would likely never get out of said small town he hated. Yeah, you knew the pattern. Everyone, where you were from, did.

“No.”

You continued on your trek to the locker, but you could hear the slight squeaking of the soles of the older boy’s Nikes on the linoleum floor trying to catch up. Where you were from, people would be staring at this type of occurrence, but because none of the students surrounding you even batted an eye at the basketball player or you for that matter, told you that it wasn’t abnormal for him to be audacious.

“Hey now, I just wanna talk.” He defended, finally catching up to you, walking alongside, but a little bit behind so he didn’t get in anyone’s way.

“Harrington, the last time you wanted to ‘talk’ was when you needed my math homework.” A chuckle escaped you as you said it, finally stopping at your locker.

“In my defense, you don’t look like a sophomore.” He tried, standing next to you as you were spinning the knob in the locker to get it open.

“Whatever, what do you want?”

“Wow, you’re grumpy. Anyways, Tommy H, Carol, and I wanna hang out but my parents don’t leave for another week, and we can’t be at Carol’s place because her mom hates Tommy, and well, you know how Tommy’s dad is.”

You hummed in amusement. “Yeah, he’s a dick, how does that involve me?” You had your binder and pencil case in one arm, staring at him with your hand inside of your locker, holding onto the cup of coffee.

“Can we hang out at your place?”

Rolling your eyes you kneeled down, placing your things down on the ground before standing upright, grabbing the collar of his jacket and pulling it towards your locker, placing it inside before closing the door on it. “Not happening.” You responded, a bright smile on your face as you grabbed your things, taking a step to walk away.

“Y/n! This isn’t funny!”

“I’m gonna correct you on that, it’s not funny to you.” The situation was probably the funniest thing you’d encountered in weeks, and considering your day to day life before used to be full of laughter and playfully teasing, that then went to quiet days spent alone and pondering, this was a nice change.

“Unlock it or I’ll tell Mrs. Jensen!”

Steve’s threat caused you to laugh, holding your things closer so you didn’t drop any of them. “A tattletale? You always did strike me as the type to tease kids in elementary school, but you never did seem like a snitch, you do know the saying right? About snitches?”

“Yeah, from you!” he responded, and although he had a serious face, you knew he was fighting back a smile as well by his voice and how his brows weren’t furrowed in frustration or anger.

“Snitches are bitches, who get stitches and end up in ditches.” it wasn’t intentional for both of you to say it at the same time, but you had, but in two very different tones of voice. Your’s was more ‘matter of fact’ and he was amused.

You stared at him for a second, your smile remaining before you stepped forward,  turning the dial of your lock to open it, and once you lifted the lever for the door, Steve got himself out, standing up straight and staring down at you, his hands finding the pockets of his jacket as you closed the locker door again. “That wasn’t fair, you look innocent,” he mumbled to himself.

“I’ll see you later?” Steve asked after a second.

“We have study hall together, so. . . maybe,” you told him, stepping away from the locker and heading down the hallway to your English class.

Bulletin boards on the walls, spaced out between each other, with thumbtacks keeping flyers and announcements up for students to see, lockers for students to keep their things throughout the day. It was all odd.

At your previous schools, lockers weren’t available. That was until your freshman year where you had to pay five dollars a year if you wanted one. And instead of bulletin boards, flyers and announcements would just be taped to the walls, or given during morning announcements, or emailed to students and parents. You were pretty sure your previous high school got rid of lockers in the late ’90s when drugs became prominent in your area and then got rid of bulletin boards when one student sent the other to the hospital with a thumbtack to the wrist, but those types of stories always had a few details in them that never made sense, allowing you to cast doubt on them. But maybe the story had just been told so many times that detail got twisted, the truth of what happened got misconstrued. Like a game of telephone.

Reaching the English classroom, you found your seat, with your anxiousness rising as you sat down, placing your coffee at the upper corner of your small desk, keeping your school supplies close to your chest.

You’d been a happy kid growing up. You didn’t have very many friends, but you had your parents, your little brother, and a condo that you’d been brought home to as a newborn that you knew was a safe place. Unlike the few friends you did have, you never really experienced anxiety or symptoms of depression, but you knew the signs, your closest friend, Mandy, dealt with it, and she confided in you often about how it felt and what it was like, and you often did your own research on it to know what you could to help her.

There were weekends where you spent a good few hours learning different breathing techniques to help her whenever she would have a panic attack, but now that you were dealing with moments where your heart sped up, your hands shook and you felt like something was terribly wrong, it was like all of those hours had been a waste because you couldn’t use them without getting more anxious.

“You okay?”

Looking to your left, you were met with a curious glance from your partner on the English project. Giving an unconvincing nod, you looked down at the top of your desk, eyes tracing over the wood pattern, lines connecting that looked like they shouldn’t, forming shapes and allowing you to distract yourself as Jonathan set his things down as well, taking his seat next to you.

Mrs. Jensen went over the usual, giving instructions for the project that everyone already knew, before leaving everyone to work, with her sitting behind her desk, a book in hand and a container of what you assumed were grapes by the purplish color. Though they could have been large blueberries.

“What’s so important about a quote?” Jonathan mumbled to himself, though it caught your attention from your own worksheet, looking over to him.

“In what context?” you asked, taking a sip from your drink as he began speaking.

“We’re talking about Romeo and Juliet, everyone knows what it’s about, you don’t really need a quote to explain things.”

You nodded when he looked over to you. “A lot of people only really know that it was written by Shakespeare and it’s about two star crossed lovers who kill themselves in the end. Mrs. Jensen probably knew that’s all anyone really remembers, she wants to make sure people know what’s actually happening.

“It’s pretty obvious, ‘Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ she’s asking where he is.” He shrugged a bit, placing the book down on the desk, pages open and light reflecting off of the glossy pages.

“No, she’s not,” you told him, getting an odd and questioning look from him. “Well, this was written in the 1500s, English is practically a new language at that point, getting its own footing for once, paintings of historical figures wouldn’t have the English spelling of their names, and English is a language that’s taken a bunch of different parts from other languages, mostly german. If you ever see a period piece that’s set around this period of time, if a child says ‘lady mother’ when they’re addressing their mom, they’re not acknowledging that their mother is a female. They’re acknowledging her title. So her husband is likely a lord of a piece of land, which makes her the lady of that land as well. It was an archaic way of showing respect to their mother by also saying she had a title.”

“How does that relate to the quote?”

“Well, early modern English had many different phrases, and things have changed, we’ve come up with ways to say things that are far more simple. While we think she’s asking where Romeo is, she’s actually asking why he’s Romeo. Why out of all the people she could have fallen for, it had to be him. The enemy. You could use that in the analysis, a bit of how it shows we don’t choose who we love, even if we know we shouldn’t love them.”

Jonathan blinked before looking at his worksheet, picking up his pencil and writing something down, paraphrasing what you had just said and only moments later the bell rang, signaling the end of the class period.

You grabbed your things, leaving as quickly as you could without looking like an idiot, trying to get away from what caused you to be so nervous and make you feel like you could be sick at any moment.

Growing up, you weren’t afraid of many things if any. But maybe you just needed something like this to make you afraid of everything and anything around you. To make you jump at the sound of a drop of water from outside your motel window landing on the metal railing of the stairs and walkway.

But you were terrified, and you wanted to wake up in your own bed, at home, with your dad gently shaking your shoulder to get you up and out of bed. You were terrified you’d never see your parents again, that you’d been too mean to your little brother growing up, and that the last memory he’d have of you was you being mean.

You hadn’t even been afraid to sleep on your own as a kid, and all the things that you weren’t afraid of as a child that you should have been, always seemed to worry your dad. But what would he say and think now? Would he be worried now that you lived in a constant state of fear? Just looking at clothing racks scared you.

Since July you’d been trying to act normal, trying to pretend everything was okay, trying to be your normal self, but your normal self would be odd to everyone else, you knew random things no one else did, you liked things no one even knew about yet, and if you tried to talk about those things, you knew it wouldn’t be a good outcome, not a sour one, but not happy.

⟛⟛

Add yourself to the taglist!

tagging who i know would want to be - 

@stonersteve​ @ilovebucketbarnes​

[courtneytincher]

My Childhood Rape and My Life That Might Have Been

Photo Illustration by The Daily BeastI have become, it seems, something of a collector: old magazines filled with young starlets, Mason jars full of homemade concoctions, confidants who were once wayward lovers, and a cat who hasn’t lived with his rightful owner—my now grown middle child—for too many years. There is a row of empty ceramic planters lining my window sill, awaiting soil and seeds and a goodness that will never arrive.Then there are the scars, both physical and emotional, that I have collected—too numerous, it seems, and too painful to count. Sometimes, I run my fingers across the blemishes—the nicks and pits and disfigurements—that litter my body. There are few mirrors in my house, lest I am forced to see the fullness of their bounty. Each one whispers its own story. Each one holds its own trauma, some petty and some profound, one and all a maker of all that is me. A thin brown keloid marks the spot along my right heel, sliced open by a broken bottle in the yard some 46 years ago when we lived in a Duck Hill public housing project. There are various other cuts and burns, some abrasions from scraping concrete, hopping fences and climbing trees. They remind me of the moments when I rejected my girlness, the femininity that left me vulnerable and afraid. I rarely think about them now or even about the small rise of skin on my back, where a man who swore he loved me shoved a blade into the meat of my shoulder as I ran screaming for my life. I tell myself that, for the most part, I have let them and the circumstances that wrought them go, and that some things, like the cat at my feet, must simply be embraced. There are a few, though, that have yet to heal. Goldie Taylor—An Open Letter to the Young Woman ‘Raped at Spelman’It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen—a 24-inch orange 10-speed with a black seat and matching vinyl-wrapped handlebars. I first spotted it on the lower floor of a Northwest Plaza department store. My godfather, Thom Puckett, promised that if I helped out around his Sinclair gas station, he would “see about that bicycle.” I swept the stockroom, grabbed extra cans of motor oil for my “uncle” Frank, and washed window shields for every customer that pulled up to a full-service pump. Puckett, who would later buy and teach me to drive my first car, made good on his word.��It was 1980 and I had just finished sixth grade. I had been elected student council president in an all-white school. The gravity of that missed me. They were simply my friends. Some still are. We played together in a creek awash with nuclear waste, ferried cakes to celebrate Mrs. Bateman’s birthday, and learned to swim at Tiemeyer Park. I could not know it then, but the world was changing around me as the evening news carried stories of an Olympic boycott, a child born from a test tube, a presidential election, and American hostages in Iran. I remember witnessing a solar eclipse from the back playground at Buder Elementary School, our makeshift viewfinders fashioned from shoeboxes. Even then, I was mesmerized by it all. Johnny Carson was the king of late night television. CNN aired its maiden newscast. My older sister got married and had a baby that summer.Weeks after Mt. St. Helen’s spewed its lava, smoke and ash into the sky, I pulled the bike from the side yard and left our small pale green house on St. Christopher Lane. It was morning, the sun still low but already burning away the dewy air. My legs, even with the saddle lowered flush with the frame’s top tube, were barely long enough to reach the pedals. I was headed to summer camp, a free city-run program at Schafer Park. It wasn’t far. Maybe a half mile. I proudly parked my bike alongside the gazebo and spent the day playing checkers, swatting tennis balls and stringing colorful beads.Some time that afternoon, I started the way home, pushing my way up sloping St. Williams Lane. Clumsily switching gears, I felt a tug at my bicycle seat as I hit the top up the small incline. It was a familiar face—an older boy, maybe 16 or 17, named Chris. What unfolded next left a wound so deep and abiding that, until this summer, I could not speak it aloud. I told myself that, like the stack of cookbooks I never open, this was a chapter best left closed. I told myself it did not matter. I remember being led down a path that led to Hoech Jr. High School and through the parking lot to a house on the other side of Ashby Road, just south of Tiemeyer Park. He pushed me through the door of a screened-in back porch, yanked down my blue and white basketball shorts, and raped me on the slat board flooring.I was eleven years old. I remember the long walk home, the darkening sky above and the buzzing winged insects that danced around the streetlights. Long after the last of the sun had drifted from the sky, I sat on our painted concrete porch sobbing, waiting for somebody to come home. My panties bloodied, my arms and knees scraped. The pain seemed to come from everywhere. I waited there with my cat Lucky, afraid to go inside until my mother turned into the gravel drive. I was unmoored. I had no idea what that meant then, but it seems the only fitting word writing this now. I belonged nowhere, and to no one specifically. Nobody took me to see a doctor. Not for my injuries, not for the infection that came after. Nobody went to the police or even sat me down to talk through what happened. My mother gave me two pills—antibiotics I assume—and rubbed ointment on the boil. I remember the pitying look she gave me, and the anger she seemed to have for me. I could not help but to believe that whatever happened to me, wherever I had been, had been my fault. Looking back, I can only imagine what manner of hell might have been unleashed in our predominantly white, working-class neighborhood where we were one of only three black families. I cannot imagine what might have been said to an all-white St. Ann police department, which took a particular interest in my decidedly black teenage brother. Or maybe, my mother’s response was a byproduct of the horrors she experienced as a child. I can make no excuses for the care and protection I was not given, though I can now give them some measure of context. Part of me understands or at least wants to. Part of me wants to go back, to demand more and better for myself.As I returned later to pull my bike from the opening of a tunnel along Coldwater Creek, where it had been ditched, I remember thinking, knowing that I was on my own. It was not the first time I had been molested and it would not be the last. The sexual violence that I endured during my formative years—at five when a neighbor boy in our housing project lured a group of my playmates into an upper bedroom, at 13 when an older cousin in the basement of my aunt’s house, through high school when a football coach preyed on me and my classmates. Sometime in 1981, I was sent to live with an aunt in East St. Louis, the crumbling town my mother had fought so relentlessly to leave. I slept on the living room floor for several years, often soiling myself in the night. When I wasn’t scrubbing floors, polishing furniture or lining a church pew, I immersed myself in books of every sort. The library in our bottoming-out neighborhood was my refuge, my safe harbor. I found Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin there. To them, and to an 8th grade honors English teacher, I owe my very survival. I was without my mother then, detached from all that I had known. My blackness was suddenly present and burdensome in ways I cannot number or name. The school smelled of piss, the lunches served in plastic wrappings and the texts missing full chapters. I won another race for student council president, joined the speech team—winning statewide competitions—and wrote essays that brought accolades. Anything to escape the lack and despair of the half burned-out school house. Goldie Taylor—Why I Waited Decades to Tell Anyone I Was RapedThere are no repressed memories for me, only a tucking away. Some of the marks on my psyche are indelible, I know. But nothing was so hurtful as the sense of abandonment I felt then and even now. It has marred relationships with my closest family and undermined my ability to navigate the waters of intimate relationships. I learned to fight, early on, as a means of self preservation and I rarely leave home after the street lights come on. This summer, as I began pulling together old essays and penning a spiritual memoir, these are the things I know that I cannot avoid. If I am to speak of my life, of the joys and triumphs, the vulnerabilities, ailments and healings, of the rocky road made smooth by the might of my own faith that there has and will be better, there is nothing I can leave out.I think now about the life that went unlived, the one that gathered layers of mold in the dark cabinets of desolation. I sometimes wonder what I might have been, but for the puss and scarring of sexual violence, how it formed and defined and confined me. Even so, I marvel in the journey itself, the things I learned to reject and accept, the withering of my faith and the solace I have created for myself in its absence. There is a strange peace in this, an odd sense of surety that I cannot shake. It allows me no hatred, no compulsion for retribution. The wounds are without salt. There is a comfort knowing that my tomorrows, if nothing else in this world, belong to me. What I choose to carry with me, to what extent what lay behind me colors the road ahead, is a decision that only I can make. “You wanna fly,” Toni Morrison wrote, “you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.”At some point, I imagine I will get around to planting that herb garden. But, for now, I am content to bear witness to my own blooming. Though the scars remains, there is a life—I know—beyond them.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Photo Illustration by The Daily BeastI have become, it seems, something of a collector: old magazines filled with young starlets, Mason jars full of homemade concoctions, confidants who were once wayward lovers, and a cat who hasn’t lived with his rightful owner—my now grown middle child—for too many years. There is a row of empty ceramic planters lining my window sill, awaiting soil and seeds and a goodness that will never arrive.Then there are the scars, both physical and emotional, that I have collected—too numerous, it seems, and too painful to count. Sometimes, I run my fingers across the blemishes—the nicks and pits and disfigurements—that litter my body. There are few mirrors in my house, lest I am forced to see the fullness of their bounty. Each one whispers its own story. Each one holds its own trauma, some petty and some profound, one and all a maker of all that is me. A thin brown keloid marks the spot along my right heel, sliced open by a broken bottle in the yard some 46 years ago when we lived in a Duck Hill public housing project. There are various other cuts and burns, some abrasions from scraping concrete, hopping fences and climbing trees. They remind me of the moments when I rejected my girlness, the femininity that left me vulnerable and afraid. I rarely think about them now or even about the small rise of skin on my back, where a man who swore he loved me shoved a blade into the meat of my shoulder as I ran screaming for my life. I tell myself that, for the most part, I have let them and the circumstances that wrought them go, and that some things, like the cat at my feet, must simply be embraced. There are a few, though, that have yet to heal. Goldie Taylor—An Open Letter to the Young Woman ‘Raped at Spelman’It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen—a 24-inch orange 10-speed with a black seat and matching vinyl-wrapped handlebars. I first spotted it on the lower floor of a Northwest Plaza department store. My godfather, Thom Puckett, promised that if I helped out around his Sinclair gas station, he would “see about that bicycle.” I swept the stockroom, grabbed extra cans of motor oil for my “uncle” Frank, and washed window shields for every customer that pulled up to a full-service pump. Puckett, who would later buy and teach me to drive my first car, made good on his word. It was 1980 and I had just finished sixth grade. I had been elected student council president in an all-white school. The gravity of that missed me. They were simply my friends. Some still are. We played together in a creek awash with nuclear waste, ferried cakes to celebrate Mrs. Bateman’s birthday, and learned to swim at Tiemeyer Park. I could not know it then, but the world was changing around me as the evening news carried stories of an Olympic boycott, a child born from a test tube, a presidential election, and American hostages in Iran. I remember witnessing a solar eclipse from the back playground at Buder Elementary School, our makeshift viewfinders fashioned from shoeboxes. Even then, I was mesmerized by it all. Johnny Carson was the king of late night television. CNN aired its maiden newscast. My older sister got married and had a baby that summer.Weeks after Mt. St. Helen’s spewed its lava, smoke and ash into the sky, I pulled the bike from the side yard and left our small pale green house on St. Christopher Lane. It was morning, the sun still low but already burning away the dewy air. My legs, even with the saddle lowered flush with the frame’s top tube, were barely long enough to reach the pedals. I was headed to summer camp, a free city-run program at Schafer Park. It wasn’t far. Maybe a half mile. I proudly parked my bike alongside the gazebo and spent the day playing checkers, swatting tennis balls and stringing colorful beads.Some time that afternoon, I started the way home, pushing my way up sloping St. Williams Lane. Clumsily switching gears, I felt a tug at my bicycle seat as I hit the top up the small incline. It was a familiar face—an older boy, maybe 16 or 17, named Chris. What unfolded next left a wound so deep and abiding that, until this summer, I could not speak it aloud. I told myself that, like the stack of cookbooks I never open, this was a chapter best left closed. I told myself it did not matter. I remember being led down a path that led to Hoech Jr. High School and through the parking lot to a house on the other side of Ashby Road, just south of Tiemeyer Park. He pushed me through the door of a screened-in back porch, yanked down my blue and white basketball shorts, and raped me on the slat board flooring.I was eleven years old. I remember the long walk home, the darkening sky above and the buzzing winged insects that danced around the streetlights. Long after the last of the sun had drifted from the sky, I sat on our painted concrete porch sobbing, waiting for somebody to come home. My panties bloodied, my arms and knees scraped. The pain seemed to come from everywhere. I waited there with my cat Lucky, afraid to go inside until my mother turned into the gravel drive. I was unmoored. I had no idea what that meant then, but it seems the only fitting word writing this now. I belonged nowhere, and to no one specifically. Nobody took me to see a doctor. Not for my injuries, not for the infection that came after. Nobody went to the police or even sat me down to talk through what happened. My mother gave me two pills—antibiotics I assume—and rubbed ointment on the boil. I remember the pitying look she gave me, and the anger she seemed to have for me. I could not help but to believe that whatever happened to me, wherever I had been, had been my fault. Looking back, I can only imagine what manner of hell might have been unleashed in our predominantly white, working-class neighborhood where we were one of only three black families. I cannot imagine what might have been said to an all-white St. Ann police department, which took a particular interest in my decidedly black teenage brother. Or maybe, my mother’s response was a byproduct of the horrors she experienced as a child. I can make no excuses for the care and protection I was not given, though I can now give them some measure of context. Part of me understands or at least wants to. Part of me wants to go back, to demand more and better for myself.As I returned later to pull my bike from the opening of a tunnel along Coldwater Creek, where it had been ditched, I remember thinking, knowing that I was on my own. It was not the first time I had been molested and it would not be the last. The sexual violence that I endured during my formative years—at five when a neighbor boy in our housing project lured a group of my playmates into an upper bedroom, at 13 when an older cousin in the basement of my aunt’s house, through high school when a football coach preyed on me and my classmates. Sometime in 1981, I was sent to live with an aunt in East St. Louis, the crumbling town my mother had fought so relentlessly to leave. I slept on the living room floor for several years, often soiling myself in the night. When I wasn’t scrubbing floors, polishing furniture or lining a church pew, I immersed myself in books of every sort. The library in our bottoming-out neighborhood was my refuge, my safe harbor. I found Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin there. To them, and to an 8th grade honors English teacher, I owe my very survival. I was without my mother then, detached from all that I had known. My blackness was suddenly present and burdensome in ways I cannot number or name. The school smelled of piss, the lunches served in plastic wrappings and the texts missing full chapters. I won another race for student council president, joined the speech team—winning statewide competitions—and wrote essays that brought accolades. Anything to escape the lack and despair of the half burned-out school house. Goldie Taylor—Why I Waited Decades to Tell Anyone I Was RapedThere are no repressed memories for me, only a tucking away. Some of the marks on my psyche are indelible, I know. But nothing was so hurtful as the sense of abandonment I felt then and even now. It has marred relationships with my closest family and undermined my ability to navigate the waters of intimate relationships. I learned to fight, early on, as a means of self preservation and I rarely leave home after the street lights come on. This summer, as I began pulling together old essays and penning a spiritual memoir, these are the things I know that I cannot avoid. If I am to speak of my life, of the joys and triumphs, the vulnerabilities, ailments and healings, of the rocky road made smooth by the might of my own faith that there has and will be better, there is nothing I can leave out.I think now about the life that went unlived, the one that gathered layers of mold in the dark cabinets of desolation. I sometimes wonder what I might have been, but for the puss and scarring of sexual violence, how it formed and defined and confined me. Even so, I marvel in the journey itself, the things I learned to reject and accept, the withering of my faith and the solace I have created for myself in its absence. There is a strange peace in this, an odd sense of surety that I cannot shake. It allows me no hatred, no compulsion for retribution. The wounds are without salt. There is a comfort knowing that my tomorrows, if nothing else in this world, belong to me. What I choose to carry with me, to what extent what lay behind me colors the road ahead, is a decision that only I can make. “You wanna fly,” Toni Morrison wrote, “you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.”At some point, I imagine I will get around to planting that herb garden. But, for now, I am content to bear witness to my own blooming. Though the scars remains, there is a life—I know—beyond them.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

August 18, 2019 at 09:56AM via IFTTT