Finding Me

Since the age of fifteen, Stacey has known the loss of a love that ran deep into the soul, and she has also known the pain that followed that loss. She swore she would never again feel that kind of pain and she found solace in a place few dared to enter and no one had ever followed her into.

Now, approaching the dreaded forty, she is a woman that has had it all - a fulfilling career, a caring husband, two healthy and happy children, and a family that really did belong on a cover of a magazine. She had checked all the boxes, stayed on the path she had set before her and never once looked back. Everything was perfect and she was... fine.

It didn't matter that she could no longer recognize the face of the woman that stared back at her in the mirror, it didn't matter that for twenty-three years she had lied to everyone she loved and shut away a part of her that she feared more than anything.

It didn't matter that the only way she knew how to feel alive was in the brief moments of painful ecstasy that she was able to create in a cold, tiled room with an old friend she couldn't seem to let go of. It didn't matter that she saw beauty in the red droplets and the marks left behind because everything was fine. She was in complete control now and it was only a matter of time before she could reclaim what she had lost. She just had to keep trying.