The World Behind My Eyes

Some children are told to be quiet. She was told she did not exist.In a house with the curtains always drawn, where school had to be earned before dawn with a scrub brush and raw hands, a girl found the one trick that kept her alive: the cold floors and the heavy footsteps in the hall were not real. They were a long, loud nightmare she was only passing through. Her true life waited behind her eyes - a sunlit porch, a warm dog against her knee, a house that never once checked the floor for dust or broke a promise.For fifteen years she lived in two worlds. They tore up her drawings, ended her schooling, and married her to a stranger at sixteen. They were certain they had finally broken her. They had only shown her how far she would go to be free.This is the story of the morning she stopped closing her eyes to find the sun - and opened them instead.