STRIPED

In a quiet countryside where trains hum and grass sways like whispered secrets, a girl with tangled hair and dirt-streaked skin searches for stripes-on lost socks, beetle shells, and the sky split by power lines. Home is a monster with many hands. She wanders, small and silent, seeing everything.

This story explores the importance of childhood, revealing the contrast between the innocence and darkness of growing up. It reflects on the significance of family, the pain of betrayal, and the quiet strength found in small, simple wonders as a young girl tries to survive both the drowning world of reality and the intricacies of childhood.

But childhood never truly ends-it follows her into adulthood, shaping the way she moves through the world, how she smiles without warmth, how she lingers in people's lives without ever fully being there. She carries the weight of her past in the way she lingers in doorways, in the careful way she speaks, as if every word must be measured. She is both the child who longed for safety and the adult who does not know how to exist without the ghosts of what shaped her.

"Abuse can feel like love, a starving man would eat anything" -Penelope Douglas