With each passing move, I found pieces of myself missing, left behind somewhere across state lines and highways. Scattered among creaking floorboards and empty rooms. With each move, I felt the ghost of the previous house following me, the echoes of the past calling my name down the highway as I watched Mom drive our getaway car like mad. With each drive to the next house, my body parts seemed to float out of the window to land among the brush, left to collect dust. 

There, in a small, square white house, uniform with all of the other houses on this part of base, were my eyes, more weary and world-worn than my mere fourteen years. There, echoing down the empty hallways of the nicest house that my seventeen years had seen yet, where my mind had been lost among the crystalline snow, were my legs. There, drifting in the rising tide down the street from a faded blue duplex, was my nose, forever bruised with the lingering scent of redwood and sea foam. Inside the small blue trailer in Olivehurst, my wristbones, small and cracked. My arms, sitting outside among evergreen mountains and humidity, sweat pooling inside of my armpits and under my girl breasts, painting lyrics from a song onto a plain white canvas. My brain filled with Lexapro and the fading memories of a facility. A painting I gave to my sister, which hung in her room for all three of the years that we lived outside of California. My feet, walking down quiet streets, cicadas humming in the late spring evening, a book under my arm. I can’t remember if this one is a dream or real. I’ve dreamt of this cold, hellish place so often. My nose, inhaling the scent of tangy earth and home from the back of a motorcycle. My fingers, typing furious words across a keyboard in the cold, brown room in my grandpa’s house, dreaming of a life where I am confident calling myself a writer. 

For all of my lost body parts, I never lost the voices of these girls, filling my mind with a sickly possession. Sometimes they are soft, whispering in tones that promise a future, and sometimes they scream at the unfairness of it all, the pain of having had no control over this life of inconsistency. Sometimes they tell me that I myself have become inconsistent with them, not living up to the dreams that I promised to achieve at seventeen, all of my youthful hope collecting dust in the journals in the back of my closet. At night, when their voices are the loudest and most persistent, I shush them. I hold them in my shaking arms. I tell them that, just like them, I cannot be everything to everyone all at once. I tell them that they should not have ever been expected to do it all. I tell them that we are more than just broken body parts. More than just a broken little girl. We are more than our baggage. But I’m still trying to figure out what that “more” is. 

I tell them that maybe we can figure it out, together.