The house I lived in was not made of wood or stone. It was built from expectation and inheritance, from silence arranged as order, from rituals passed down like furniture no one ever questioned.

I am learning the girl I once was. Her face, her hands, her voice appear in old photographs, in journals with ink bleeding like bruises. She startles me. Her mania hangs in the air like smoke; her suffering is sharp, unyielding. I read her pages and shiver at the clarity of her terror and courage.