i.

Foggy mornings spent sitting pressed up against the other side of a plywood bathroom door while my mother confesses her sins to the toilet seat. Too young to understand her prayer or her obsession with repentance, I run my finger over the bleach-stained carpet until it softens to my skin, touching me back. The gentle friction against my tiny hand a way to feel felt.

I will wear down that carpet trying to figure out if I’m a girl or a ghost.

ii.

Before bed every night I would say my prayers three times; quickly, on a single breath. I would pray for my family, my friends, some people that I didn’t really know but who I believed were sad and in need of love. I wasn’t sure what I was praying to, but I saw girls like me kneel before their beds at night, clasp their fingers together (the steeple, inside are the people) and lift their eyes skyward.

When I was eleven, I switched my nightly invocations for unrefined attempts at masturbation. Unlike my unanswered prayers, when I worshiped my body — it delivered me.

iii.

Somewhere between starting my period and starting college applications I learned to sleep anywhere. Cars. Stairwells. Couches. Attic crawl spaces. Futons. Frameless mattresses. Floors. In fully lit apartments with bass thrumming on the other side of the wall I was curled up against. In the deafening silence of a starkly empty, echoing, forgotten house.

When I slept I didn’t dream; but when I was awake, it was all I did.

iv.

Philadelphia at 5 a.m., a cold, deserted bus terminal. I watch the sun creep up over the horizon, which is hidden somewhere behind the buildings that shoot up from the concrete all around me; a shimmering metal field. I curse it silently. I didn’t want the sun to rise. I didn’t want the day to turn over, for the world to fall forward on its hands and knees and crawl toward infinity.

I wanted it to roll over like I had; to submit to life’s unyielding tendency to snap your spine before it tells you to run.

v.

From the other side of three separate offices, across eighteen miles of cracked ground, I have watched time tend to her. I have asked her to tell me how to change myself, and for fifty minutes a week she has imparted psychological wisdom, with her whim and wizardry and often woebegone eyes — she has been my confessional.

Yet when I whirl around and look back at her, from where I’ve grabbed my skirts and run ahead, kicking up that dry dusty ground, I see that her words were not the touchstone I had steadied myself upon. All along it was the knowledge that she was watching, that she saw me — the heartsease at being noticed was the silent current that carried me through.

vi.

Foggy mornings spent with the heels of both hands pressed against my eyes, my body shaking, chest heaving. Tears wet my eyes, cascade over my cheekbones, my tongue darting out to catch them but missing more than it tastes.

I turn over, bring my knees to my chest, bury my face in my damp pillow. My shoulders shudder, my entire body jerking, and when I look up, over top the bedclothes and see him smiling sleepily at me, I swallow back what bubbles up inside of me. I try to catch my breath.

Sliding my hand across the cool sheets, I take his in mine.

“Oh — I needed that,” I say. And we both start the cycle of unquenchable laughter again while rain beats at the window behind our heads, jealous it can’t come in to the warmth of what we are.

Abby Norman is just another writer/asshat on Twitter. She’s an editor of The Coffeelicious and frequent contributor to Human Parts on Medium, All That Is Interesting and The Mary Sue.

She and her dog live in New England in a very Grey Gardens type situation.