Personal Essay - Completed December 2025

Currently under simultaneous submission

Short Description:

The Distance Between Us is a personal essay about how family trauma teaches stillness as survival. It begins with a fourteen-year-old trapped in a car with a volatile father searching for a runaway sister, a formative moment that establishes a lifelong pattern of managing instability through silence and immobility.

Moving between childhood and adulthood, the essay traces how proximity to a sister’s choices becomes inseparable from exposure to their consequences. It examines the mechanics of learned restraint: how staying invisible offers protection, how witnessing without intervening leaves its own residue, and how distance eventually emerges as the boundary required to remain intact. That boundary carries its own cost: a quiet, permanent grief for what cannot be repaired.

(A publication link will be added once the piece is placed.)

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