This art is a collection that can alter unease. In January of 2020, I collaged thirty-one photos of a smaller version of me into nurturing environments filled with images from the natural world. This child likes ice skating, banana seat bike stunts, latch hook rug making, and making rafts out of plywood. She longs to be an artist and a writer someday, but doesn’t yet know the language to ask about this. She dresses herself in the morning and makes her own tuna fish sandwiches that she packs into a paper floral lunch bag her mom bought her at the fabric store. Her mom works the early shift at an assisted living facility and can’t be home as much as she would like.

She dreams about justice and loves until she cries, at every movie, at every person sitting alone without a friend at the diner on Father’s Day. She wasn’t always protected or cared for in the exact right way. There were moments she thought the monsters were coming for her, from within the closet and underneath the bed. She saw shadows on the wall and imagined the takers coming to take her from a home that sometimes had no one but a shadow in it and a home that sometimes had too many people within it, people who were loud and awake too long and drunk and didn’t know enough to imagine that a child was scared of all of this. But all of that is over now, and here we are tracing the steps back to repose.

Art can be like a time machine that takes us to places not forgotten, adjusting the cracked pieces into new formations.