this is what happens when you lock the itty bitty baby princess away in a tower away from everyone else because she is definitely somewhere on the autism spectrum and she cries every day when she gets home from school and the only other person in her everyday life for five years is her sister who wears the same shirt size. and then you let her grow up in second hand clothes and her only socialization with the outside world is carefully curated and limited and she is sheltered so that she doesn’t know anything about anything and she doesn’t know you can just put lipgloss in your pocket and walk out the store and the leash is short but at least she has a flip phone which is her freedom to wander out of sight of her mother for the first time at 13 years old and at 16 years old she still believed that writing in a diary meant she had a right to privacy as she processed what was happening in her life with the written word and it was like that until she finally got her drivers license and the first thing she discovers in the world away from home is a catholic highschool boyfriend whose mother believes in abstinence and does not believe in privacy and the second thing she finds is the woods and the lake near her community college campus where she doesn’t fit in very well and the third thing she finds is a blank composition notebook in a dollar store and book of calculus problems and the fourth thing she finds is a flannel shirt and a haircut and the fifth thing she finds is that she has outgrown the a catholic boyfriend and his mother and she cries and the sixth thing that she finds is that women are beautiful and yet men feel so much safer to talk to even when they aren’t because you can accidentally hurt men and they’ll be okay but if that attraction to women isn’t welcome then you’ve accidentally broken something that might never be repaired, and the seventh thing she finds is another safe man to talk to and the eighth thing she finds is a library and the ninth thing she finds is a keyboard and words and Rilke recommended, in his Letters to a Young Poet, “ask yourself if you would die if you were forbidden to write…”

and I think that I probably would.