My grandmother named me Sophia after her daughter who died giving birth to me. I grew up in what felt like a cardboard box 10x10 all covered in trinkets and jewels. I was meant to her to be a doll. At night they'd play and sing to me. Cuckoo-clocks and music boxes that my grandmother collected on glass shelves, floors, and window sills. I think she thought they'd fill up her heart after my mother died, but all they did was fill up her house. And we were never enough. 

Sometimes I'd stay up late and catch her in her nightgown walking around the living room filled with beautiful fragile things. She'd put on the Christmas lights that never came down. In between my sleepy lids she'd look just like an angel singing to the stars. I thought- that's what its like to be truly crazy. One minute you're this divine being reaching, flying high above the sky, in your living room, but to the outside world you're a cookey old lady in a house rotting with cat feces with a very bruised child. On nights when she'd forget to feed me dinner i'd sit in the filth screaming, but she'd ignore me. And instead she'd sing lullabies to her trinkets and porcelain dolls. 

I only broke one once. Only once. I was seven and I was tired of screaming at a wall so I took a ballerina music box from the middle shelf. It was white porcelain and played a beautiful little french tune. My grandmother loved her most of all. She was a dancer who had migrated here from Mexico to join Julliard only to be told she wasn't good enough and so she praised this tiny white thing. I took it looking at her straight in the eye and broke it. I smashed it in my tiny hands letting porcelain shards cut into me. She let out a tiny broken sound and then didn't say anything to me for a week. She didn't talk or look at me. Even when I'd curl up with her on her chair. She would pretend I didn't exist. The weight of my body felt hallow and I, invisible. 

After that I taught myself how to feed myself when I was hungry, clean myself when I was dirty, and hold myself when it was time to go to sleep. I learned to be mean because she loved things more than me. Things can never feel even when they're shattered to a million pieces. 

I never strayed far from home ever. The pain of seeing me every day made her hair grow longer and whiter. I could see it in her eyes. My existence killed her, but if I wasn't there she would become desperate for me. AI'd sit in waiting far away but never far from her imagining her in her robe rotting against the couch singing some dreadful tune from her music box. her white hair draped across her shoulders and over her high olive cheekbones like a beautiful aging statue. She was thin and frail and frightening to me. The day before my graduation I found her face down in the tub with an electrical cord sticking out of the water. I remember seeing her there in the tub with half her face sticking out of the water staring at me with those eyes. Quietly not listening to me. I walked away like a ghost to her chair where I crumpled and as if a symphony to a life long tragedy all of her cuckoo clocks and music boxes began to play. The lights flickered on and off and I could feel her there with fury swarming around me. Her sadness trying to eat me whole. And I feeling nothing. 

I was the only one who attended the funeral and I sat alone at my graduation in, what felt like, complete silence. She left me with nothing. I sold off all her trinkets and the house just to get out. I honestly would have burned the house down if they had let me. I would have burned everything along with me in it, but I thought that distance could save me from my past. So I applied for an MFA at Portland State University far from New York. A journey I traveled alone to with a small black bag and a single book of poetry.