I wait my whole life for someone to pick me up and hold me. I seduce, tantalize, flirt, flaunt my beauty—fall in love just waiting for someone to lift me, to wrap me in their arms and tell me I am safe. But the realization slams into me as I lay there, frozen beneath him: No one is coming. Not now, not then, not when I was screaming in that crib at one year old, my tiny body writhing in desperation, lungs bursting for someone—anyone—to hear me. They were there, but they weren’t here. They were in the other room. Just out of reach. And now, decades later, that same loneliness claws at my chest, a ghost of every moment I needed to be held and wasn’t.
