Dear Spencer

I was told to write it in a letter. Put everything I was thinking, everything I was feeling, everything that had happened, in to a fucking letter. I was mute for a better part of the last several years and my current therapist thought writing it down would be better, easier, that it would help...

Reflect, accept, heal?

And I thought I was the crazy one. Levi, my older brother, had assured me that neither one of us were crazy. And since I know Levi would never lie to me I reluctantly took his word for it.

So I wrote the letter, I just wouldn't send it.

Dear Spencer,

I sure hope Arizona is better than New York, I mean you couldn't have gotten further from your home state while remaining in the continental U.S. at least.

But you can't run from the trauma, you know that... Poppy told me that.

I thought that fresh starts were often disguised as running, easily misunderstood. I didn't say that though.

I was just hoping my family would benefit just as much as I hoped I would.

We were New Yorkers after all, it was in our blood.

So was ice skating.

In fact, all the hard work put into training during my adolescence allowed me to receive the most prestigious of invitations.

An invitation to skate for the U.S.A in the winter Olympics. I was 13 at the time and would have two years to train with the team before I would skate at the Olympics at the age of 15.

I was one of the youngest on the team in the last two decades. That's what the Olympic assistant coach told my parents at dinner all those years ago when she first made the offer. My coach at the time was so proud of me then. He was always so proud.

But that was before everything.

Five surgeries, two rehabs, three psychiatrists and roughly four years later here I am sitting in an air conditioned mall in the middle of Arizona with a blueberry and cola icee.

But this is where my senior year begins.