Years ago l swore off writing because it was getting in the way of my story. Some sort of observer's paradox where the perception broke into a dam of longer restrained introspection, and as we all know spelt a recipe for interception. When things were bad, this effect, though consciously not intended, was a welcome source of scarcely-had agency. It was a veil from reality despite its best attempts to portray simultaneous events and tame them all the same. To begin to tell the story was a matter of literary teething, foretelling a survival and endurance of the narrator that carries beyond the events themselves. However sharp those teeth, the experience came with soreness. I longed to write like a teething infant longs to chew, an instinct, a balm to the pain that is so tangible viscerally. And yet I felt stabbed by my own unsheathed pen: first when I touched my own emotional bruises with it, and then when it began to carve marks into the story itself. When writing, it felt as though I had been deployed as a spy: using all of what I know and witnessed, against myself.