Waving goodbye through the back windows of our van, we climbed the winding hill and watched the golden sunset over our friend’s house. The white tower of their mother-in-law's unit faded from view — we’d spent the last few days crammed in there. Lying on the ground in my sleeping bag in the living room the night before, I tried to listen to my parents’ muffled voices behind the bedroom door, but all I could hear was my mother’s quiet sobbing. I turned my face to the side and stared at the haunting clown painting on the dark wall, tears sliding down my nose and into my mouth.

As we turned back down our own long gravel driveway, I could already see from the top of the road that my grandparents’ motor home was gone. All that was left behind was faded, worn-out turf and a few plastic lawn chairs — a pockmark on the face of our property. A haunted ground of smelted memories and unanswered questions.

My younger siblings chirped and chattered, curious about where Grandma and Grandpa had gone.

“They moved,” was all they were told. My older brothers exchanged glances and grimaces — they’d been briefed by our Dad on the situation and told to step up their responsibilities watching over the younger kids.

Unpacking my duffel bag in the room I shared with my two younger sisters and one of my little brothers, I shoved my socks and t-shirts back into the dingy white dresser drawers and flopped down on the bottom bunk. Pinching my legs through my jeans, I searched for any feeling inside my body other than numbness — all my fingers left behind were bruises nobody would ever see anyway.

Falling asleep back in my own bed that night, I knew I no longer needed to worry about the creaks in the night coming from a lumbering form — all he’d left behind was the ghost of a trauma I couldn’t yet name, even as I wrapped myself tighter in my blanket of shame. After all the secret-keeping I’d done, all I could do now was choke on the thick silence his misdeeds had brought into our house. He was just… gone, while I was left without any answers, only assurances that I’d never see him again. And I never did.

Within a week, I was giving my testimony to a female detective and showing her on a teddy bear, in a private room, where his hands had wandered on my own tiny parts of my body.

Twenty years later, I finally learned what had happened to my Grandpa Eugene and Grandma Mary when I sat down with my father to go over the details of his final confrontation with his own parents.

Watching my father’s eyes mist over, he paused to draw shaky breaths between recounting, as we tenderly uncovered old wounds over a cup of coffee.

A meeting at a diner arranged. A $3,000 check slid across the table. A verbal promise made to leave the county. A broken word discovered, a threat carried out. A phone call to the sheriff. An arrest. A volley of weasel words and lies launched. A disowning of their own son. Six months spent in county jail. A Nolo Contendere plea bargain struck. And a sixty-plus-year-old pedophilic sex offender freed. A whirlwind move out of state. Parole broken. Acrid phone calls and emails filled with hate lobbed at my father.

My father never saw his own father again after that breakfast confrontation — now twenty-four years ago, on his own birthday. His mother declared him dead to her. His sister cursed him out and cut off communication as she welcomed their parents into her home.

It was my father who was to blame, they said — he was trying to get away with molesting me and pin it on his own parents. I was called confused and a liar; just a lonely little girl making up stories for attention, who didn’t know who was really causing her harm.

Eventually, the vitriol and poisonous communications slowed to showing up only on my Dad’s birthday and holidays. My Grandpa made multiple attempts to contact me over the years through various emails and social media profiles he could find, right up until the year he finally died. I blocked them all.

When I got the news that he’d passed away — somewhere on the East Coast, grave unknown — I hunted down the one photo I’d still left buried in a box of mildewed polaroids.

Snapping on the lighter, I watched the ring of fire consume my blonde six-year-old head, and finally his balding one, his vulturous gaze locked on my body as he pushed me on the swingset.

Lying in the peace of my own bed now at thirty-six, I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I know that this evil, familiar boogeyman of old is a rotting sack of flesh and bones who died bitter and miserable, nobody weeping over his toxic last breath. And as I exhume these decades-old memories, I uncover her past with a tenderness and clarity that a fog of shame had once obscured in the years after he was taken away in handcuffs

Out of the pitchiest of graves and the black holes I keep falling into as I dive back for memories, there’s the faintest glimmer I can spy in these past reviews. And scratching her way towards a luminous surface is a soul that kept a little scrap of hope beyond being labeled a victim, knowing her story had already been whispered before she walked through various church doors.

In her hands, she holds the key to life on the other side of this veil of sorrow. And every click of the shutter beneath her finger brings her one step closer to feeling something more than numb again.

She wouldn’t know until fifteen years later that therapy had been turned down on her behalf after her abuse was exposed. But peering through a new viewfinder, the world called to her on the other side of the glass, whispering through a new lens words and future dreams she never had to share with anyone — secrets were safely kept between blades of grass, falling leaves, and a fresh wind that swept away the past.

My silence on here hasn’t been intentional. I can attribute it mostly to living life fully through my (work) lens. It’s been a whirlwind month-plus of photographing sports arenas, foreign dignitaries, swanky rooftop bar parties, VIP high-end restaurant openings, spring menu launches, editorial gigs, and a kaleidoscope of sparkling faces.

In between the heftiest workload I’ve taken on since the Biden Administration — yes, seriously, it’s been a painful, scrappy existence for a year and a half — I tried to maintain a disciplined workout schedule, flew to see my daughters, tweaked my back somehow, and stepped into an advocacy role for female friends of mine who exposed a community scandal involving a local “celebrity” chef. Nothing says talent like plating skills with a side of sexual assault and harassment, amiright??

Catching my breath and sanity between gigs and group text updates, I’ve kept my eyes on the breaking news headlines, and felt my pulse jump time and again as we witness the downward, demented spiral of a madman with access to our nuclear codes. My sleep health and screen time have both suffered, tethered together as I soul-search for the willpower to stop the panicked daily scroll habit.

My disgust for much of mankind remains, while my appreciation for some has grown out of this steaming pile of manure we are tasked with consuming every day. I keep the good ones close and connected to the betterment of my own community, while elevating those I see doing Herculean work with their voices, virtually and otherwise. As shocking and disgusting as it has been to swallow the acrid reality that rape academies exist — with online traffic dwarfing other legitimate commercial websites — or to digest the decades-long cover-up and cabal of evil men who enabled and encouraged Epstein and his cohorts, as a woman who has also experienced sexual abuse and assault by more than one perpetrator, I remain unsurprised.

But I do remain angry and invigorated to enact change in the remainder of my own timeline, which is a micro-blip in this vast universe. Artemis II visuals and vocals reinforced what we have forgotten as we trudge, head down, glued to our bad-news devices: we are the same thing on this one planet we call home, and we have to get through this together.

As I continue to think back and tap out the remembrances of my own past for this book, I recall so many faces and apologists who traipsed through my life, wreaking maximum damage with minimum consequence. Some more so than others. Some intentional, some not. But this last fall was the final straw for tolerating any more excuses, when my bumbling and tipsy date at the time, swept my current work camera body and lens onto the ground at his house, shearing my hopes for salvaging my favorite and oldest 55mm lens, and ensuring our own future ended that night by his follow-up actions. Consoling this 40-year-old man, who just as swiftly crumpled to the ground, blubbering and wailing over the mishap he’d caused, I held the crashed bits of my work tools and our crumbling relationship in a hug for one more night until the wine wore off. Two months of getting to know somebody somehow felt like weathering two years instead.

My pride overrode my pursuit of payment, and I dropped it along with the relationship. He hemmed and hawed about it anyway; ultimately, I never saw a Venmo reparation — our last transaction had been splitting a $45 dinner tab anyway; my dating taste really needs to at the very least upgrade to less broke crybabies.

When I saw him most recently out and about, he did ask for a t-shirt back that he’d left at my house months back, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me a mirthful smirk to inform him it was in the trash along with the lens he’d cracked. Our final interactions left me determined to stop giving my time and energy away for mediocrity, yet again. I KNOW refocusing that energy on myself, and my own writing and life will yield much better investments.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And this year, it is also the first time I’ve felt myself truly turn a corner on a dream I’ve never quite been able to pluck from the fading ether of my subconscious — bringing this book to life. My story traverses far beyond a singular incident, isolated in the petrified past of a little girl who wasn’t given the tools to move past the perversions of a family predator, left wondering if her purity for a future patriarchal marriage was left intact or dented.

This book is not coming to fruition through the margins of my life… I am writing it as I am living it; co-existing with the perpetual heartbreak of leaving my children with a hostile and controlling ex and his family, while holding onto a titanium hope that our future is around the bend… just a few more years of circling the moon, my Darlings.

No Palantir can predict my future outcomes when I finally hit publish — birthing a story decades in the making, while digging graves for the specters of my past. But I do know one thing:

It cannot stay buried inside me any longer.

Car selfies snapped before prestigious photoshoots.

Housekeeping

Thank you for reading my posts. I try to keep the majority of my work free for the first two weeks. Paying subscribers can unlock my archived work from the last two years. If you enjoyed this article, would you consider becoming a subscriber to support me at $5/month, or I’d love it if you helped fuel my little caffeine habit by Buying Me A Coffee, or kept my mental health meet-ups with friends affordable. Thank you so much!

When I woke up this morning, I knew I’d forgotten something in the haze of yesterday evening’s flirtations as I smiled and sipped on refills of my drink, shrugging off the stress of a heavy work cycle right now and incessant worries about the state of the world.

The face opposite mine familiarly grinned and laughed as we caught up. I could drink him in visually all day…

Housekeeping

As always, I try to keep the majority of my work on Substack free and open to all - I don’t feel comfortable sharing some of my erotic work without a paywall in place. If you want to support me outside of Substack, I’d love any contribution on Buy Me A Coffee that you want to send. Only a Substack paid subscription can unlock the next installment of this article, however. If you are a supportive friend or family member, you’ve been warned to view and read with sensitive eyes.

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