“My whole body relaxes and everything finally stops moving for a moment. I feel so content and happy and calm. I think this must be what it feels like to come home.”
“Over the nights, over the months, through the years that blend and move and morph like dreams, the feeling transmitted through the picture of the woman who’ll be my mother becomes the only thing that gets me through. It’s the thin thread of possibility I hold on to, to get me through this hell.”
“There are other details of those days before my new life really began—many of them sad. All that matters now is the big picture: My mother had come for me. And she was taking me home.”
“I keep waiting. For the door to open. For someone else to come in. When no one else comes, I start to realize that what happened to me in Ukraine wasn’t normal. I begin to feel ashamed. And I don’t even know why.”
“When I look in the mirror, I begin to have a disjointed, lonely association with my own image. I have no idea who I look like. I am only me.”
“I can’t tell Mom. Any of it. I don’t want her to think that she adopted a bad girl who deserved all those punishments. She won’t love me anymore. I can’t let her send me back there.”
“At a time when girls start to care what they look like, begin comparing themselves to other girls, and become deep wells of self-consciousness, I take to wearing long sleeves to try to cover my telltale hands, sweating determinedly through the summer in the name of concealment. I begin to learn what ugly is.”
“You look over your shoulder once or twice, just to make sure your path is straight and you’re going in the direction you want. But rather than constantly staring at the end goal, you trust the process. You just go.”
“Even though my dark Ukrainian memories outweigh the happy ones by a magnitude, I’m still proud to be from there. It makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense at all. I do know this: I want to have a story on my skin that represents something of my own choosing.”
“You can love the whole of yourself—which I think I do now, finally—but hate the marring and imperfection that is part of the whole. It’s like loving a house: you can hate the cracks in the walls but love the potential it shows on the outside.”
“There are some things I won’t ever express. They’re only for me. But I can share my story of failures and successes and everything in between—those things that make all of us human. Everything that prepared me for what I needed to step onto the start line and reach the finish.”