You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

This little girl's grown up by now," she said.Almost.Not quite.I wish you all a long and happy life.

I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.

To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.

I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.