Chapter 1
Almost Loved
Born Into a Story That Wouldn’t Hold Me
Love felt permanent to some kids. They inhaled it like oxygen, present, invisible, assumed. The adults stayed, the rules stayed, the rooms stayed, and even when life got messy, the foundation held. They didn’t have to learn love’s weight because they never carried the fear of losing it. Childhood like that doesn’t erase pain, but it gives you a baseline: you belong here, and you can settle into it.
My baseline was movement. Before I understood language, my body understood instability. My nervous system learned the muscle memory of being lifted, carried, handed off, examined, evaluated, and shifted again. The earliest pieces of my history don’t read like a story; they read like paperwork, files, case numbers, short notes typed by adults trained to assess survival, not nurture a soul. On paper, the descriptions feel clinical, detached, almost polite, as if a few sentences can hold a whole child.
Real life doesn’t live on the page. It lives in the stomach that knots before you know why, the shoulders that stay braced when the room is quiet, the way a child learns to scan faces before he learns to trust words. I can’t give you a neat beginning with one scene that explains it all. Memory doesn’t cooperate when you start life small and scared, and it doesn’t hand you a clean reel of footage. It offers fragments: fluorescent lights that hum, disinfectant in a hallway, fabric scratching skin, or air too cold for how bright the room is.
People who grew up safe sometimes want details that early, names, dates, a plotline they can map. The instinct makes sense because it turns chaos into something manageable. But the first truths my body learned weren’t chronological. They were sensory: cold metal on a scale, adult hands lifting you without asking, keys and clipboards, or a door that closes and leaves you inside a room you didn’t choose. Even now, when I reach back that far, what comes forward isn’t a clear story. It’s the feeling of being moved like an object inside a process.
One house tried to anchor itself in my mind, not because it was perfect, but because it lasted longer than everything else. Faces didn’t stay the way movies portray memory, as if the brain stores close-ups forever, and full conversations didn’t hold either. My mind latched onto shapes, colors, temperature, the way a drowning person grabs whatever floats. Something red. Something blue. Time that didn’t collapse under my feet.