My body is a bomb—a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. This thought moves through me daily. I hear the ticking. I feel the ticking. I don’t know when it will explode.

How do you live in a body that is the site of so many crime scenes?

You clean up each mess, but there is always residue that remains. You can never scrub it to what it was before. That doesn’t exist anymore. The thing is, you’re not dirty—even if you feel like you are. You’re just a slightly different shape than you were and this new shape needs getting used to; needs feeling into. This new shape is ripe like a bruise. And even though a person (or people) created this new shape for you without your consent, it is still you; it’s not them or what they did to you.