That was when I saw it. A bit of dark fuzz in the cavity of her armpit. A wave of roiling emotions I didn’t know I had churned deep in my gut.

So yes, we are all a composition of colorful, jagged fragments but those cracks that make us are not flaws, just what holds you together. It is love that shapes our lives.

My dad lived in the same house for the majority of his childhood. The unchanging, parallel suburbs of the one and only New Jersey—a pocket stuck in the 70s. Boring and forgotten, like the stuffed doll I left in the corner of my old apartment, now living a new life filled with another child’s play things.