As a young child growing up in a home filled with abuse of all spots and stripes, the last thing I wanted to do was lose it like my parents did, and so, you’d usually find me down by the creek pretending to be a blue heron poised above bull and leopard frogs who tested me to see if I could become like one of the fastest and most patient fishers in the animal kingdom.

I thought, why not learn to be faster and more patient than abuse and the way it often hastily has to feel bad about itself while it’s in the middle of working things out and ironically, trying to help you be less poisonous to touch.

Then as a teenager I felt so angry and powerless I had to craft a slingshot out of that anger and go careening off through the woods to, though I didn’t know it then, catch myself being a pill.

To feel loved, and right soulless human wrongs for the sake of a soul, I had to go spear fishing in the darkness of my own heart. But I still think I can’t know for sure what love I found there.