What have I been doing for the last decade? Everything is chronicled in short stories and poems, but none of it seems to make it past the head space of 2008. As if nothing new or real has touched my life since then. Where have I been?

In the hopes of finally forming a collection, I have recently been combing through my old work, finding something about the colossal mass of themed material to be deeply disturbing. As if I had been driving past a car accident that I didn’t want to look at, and instead of moving on, I pulled over, got out and stared at it for ten years. With the potential to slip so easily back down into such a dark world, why bother tell a story that I’ve worked so hard to move away from?

At the same time, while I spent forever trying to reconcile two very separate, yet similar, events from every angle imaginable, something inside of me could still see past it. Little decisions were made under the radar that changed my course until it came time to make one big decision. In a sense I presented myself with the option to start a new chapter, under the strict stipulation that I truly let everything holding me down go. To accept the difference between a fresh wound, and an old scar. The hazy memory of a friend, and the reality of a corpse that was never aware that I ever visited, or spoke to his body.

So, I essentially have two collections of writing. One is the story of something that happened to someone else, with a very abrupt and finite ending. The other is an unrelated, violent moment that nearly ended my life, but didn’t, and was followed by countless other pivotal moments that are never mentioned. How did I ever think that was all I had to say? That surviving wasn’t the takeaway?

Was everything I ever wrote just a warm up to the actual story?

Luciana, 29