She was the one to start giving pieces of herself away so she could live. The old pieces metamorphosed into beings that represented the unspoken desires she held inside. Her desires were never fully explored, so they came out as mangled beings, friendly and incomplete.

They lived their incomplete lives together, validating one another, making their home into a place where their various form of hideous beauty could be out for all to see, yet not remarked upon. It was not the consensus reality of a family that despised, yet could not live without one another. They were all her, to some degree.

Eventually they would develop into fuller beings, and move into different parts of the world, never speaking again, and certainly never mentioning those vulnerable times. It crusted over in the form of a memory of punks living in an apartment on campus, and was eventually washed away in the tide of all their separate histories.

Leslie Powell