Last night I stood in front of the hot case at Costco, contemplating the rotisserie chickens. Some of the bags were open (eek); most of them were sweaty (ew). Sometimes meat is like this for me: the longer I look, the more I question my carnivorous habits.

Mid-thought, a cart pulled up, so I hurriedly grabbed the handles of a chicken pouch and turned to leave with my hot-market-kill.

“That one is small, no?”

The woman behind me pointed toward my bird. “They are not all the same size,” she said, a little coy, with the hint of an Eastern European accent. “Do you want a bigger one?”

Then, in a true act of valor, she reached deep into the hot case to hand-select a more substantial carcass for me. She passed it over, shrugging, and we stood there for a moment with our chicken pouches poised like purses.

I thanked her with as much gratitude as I could muster without sounding insane. Back at the cart, I asked my boyfriend if he’d seen the exchange. He had.

We wheeled away and I told him, in all seriousness:

“Love is a Costco chicken.”

Dignity and dopamine had long since decomposed; rotten from the outside in, and then from the inside out. I didn’t know where I was, or who I was. But I did, suddenly, know one thing:

I’m an addict, and an alcoholic, and I need help.

The thought came abruptly. Loudly. Straight from my core to the cosmos, like a brand-new constellation of cognition.

In the dreary dawn light from a cellar window, I rolled over, reaching blindly to the floor, desperate for my phone to be there. My shaky hands found it, and I allowed myself a shallow exhale of relief when I saw it still had battery.

I opened the first text and found the thread that would change everything:

“How dare you,” it read.

The message was from a peripheral friend, Natalie. A former girlfriend of a best friend. As I stared at her words, shards from the night before assembled vaguely into view:

Drinks and wide-bore straws, neon lights and pounding eardrums. I remembered piling into a stranger’s car, and the insatiable itch inside my brain that needed more—always trapped inside a body that could never get enough.

Somewhere during the night, I had messaged Natalie asking for her boyfriend’s number, so I could get his dealer’s number, so I could get a bag that gave me a reason to live—but, ironically, was also paving my path to die.

Her text went on:

“You know that Brian is trying to get clean right now. And you’re going to ask me to ask him for his dealer’s number?”

She was right.

I had tried to use a person—her person—as a tool. Only later would I understand how dangerous merely having a dealer’s number could be; how the weight of a contact could sit in my phone like a loaded gun.

What happened next, as my sponsor would later tell me, was a split second of divine intervention paired with willingness.

“You’re right,” I typed back to her, from a place outside my body. “And I think I need help.”

Then, despite the awfulness of me, she answered:

“Come over.”

After a series of taxis and frozen concrete curbs, I showed up at Natalie’s house—utterly dead, save for the tiny flicker of hope she’d extended in the form of an open door.

From her living room floor, she told me about a friend she knew in a 12-step program.

When I asked Natalie if she thought I was an alcoholic, she said she wasn’t sure—but that she thought I had lost my way.

She couldn’t give me an answer, but she gave me something else that morning; something I’d never had: grace.

Not grace in the way of softness, but grace in the way of prayer. Grace as an undeserved favor. Grace as the spiritual spackle that can only be mixed from a compassionate heart.

That day, I went home and took several “Am I an Alcoholic?” quizzes online.

I went to a meeting that night—circular, candlelit, safe.

I connected with the woman Natalie put me in touch with. We are both still sober today.

Natalie allowed me to say, for the first time, “I need help.”

From there, I could talk to my mom. I could talk to myself.

It started with my realization, but it was shepherded by Natalie’s words:

Come over.

Last week, I pulled a card for the writing group I lead. “What do you want to write?” the prompt asked.

“What brought you to this page?”

It changes every minute. You know how it is—we’ve shared writing like we share DNA.

But as I sit here on this cold Colorado morning, days after watching Pretti take bullets in his back and Good’s blood dry on the airbags, I’ve decided: I want to write to you.

I want to write the things I haven’t said, or asked. For years, I’ve played a direct but polite daughter.

Maybe I’ve stayed quiet because I love you, and I don’t want us to end up like your other children, now gone or estranged.

Maybe I’ve remained coy because I know our blood shares the same boiling point.

I’ve seen both our types reach places we don’t come down from easily.

But avoiding the heat doesn’t lower the temperature—it just keeps the pot rattling.

To write to you at all, I have to write about the boil. I have to ask questions.

Because I don’t understand how the cordiform cavity you gave me the coding for can beat so different.

Is it because my heart was finished by hands you don’t recognize?

Did you know, Dad, that when you left, I was raised at other people’s tables? People who had crossed borders and learned new tongues?

They fed me milanesa and chorizo and took me to soccer games in your absence.

Did you know, Dad, that the whiteness you want in this country is exactly what has hurt your baby girl the most?

Did you know that I was sexually assaulted when I was fifteen, in Barbados?

It was a blond white man, by a bonfire. He tried to pull my pants down in the dark.

A local man intervened and stayed beside me until dawn.

Do you remember the Somali families you met in Maine—the ones you cooked with at the soup kitchen, the ones whose strength you admired as you broke bread together?

I want to know: how do you go from admiration to dehumanization?

Did the grains taste different then? Or has your memory just turned bitter?

Did you know, Dad, that I lost my virginity to rape when I was nineteen, in Stockton, California? It was a white graduate student who played water polo. When it was over, he slung me over his shoulder like a bulky bag of trash, and dropped me on the ground.

Your youngest daughter.

I want to ask: Can we deport him, instead?

Did you know, Dad, that when my life has been broken I’ve found solace and care in the people of Mexico?

While you were making jokes about fifty‑three of them suffocating in a truck, I was just across the border in Baja, rebuilding my soul in their company.

They welcomed me on their soil, without suspicion or cruelty.

And when I lived in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and hitchhiked every day for half a year, the only time I feared for my life was when a white man picked me up and took me to a drug deal at the end of a dead‑end street.

My friend Tess and I had to escape the car when he stopped at a bar.

We ran miles home in the dark, back to the safety of our Costa Rican families.

Is the narrowing a simple, binary story? Outsiders are dangerous, insiders are good?

Do you notice every crime that fits your fear but ignore every kindness that contradicts it?

Have you forgotten the Somali families you cooked with, or the men in Baja who helped put your daughter together?

Is this how ordinary people—good fathers even—get talked out of their own hearts?

This is not a letter about hating whiteness, or hating you.

It’s about the blanketing blindness. The blur that spreads when we stop seeing faces and start seeing categories.

Do you still see my face, Dad?

I didn’t want to write about “me” or “I.” But maybe if you can see me, you can see Alex and Renee, too.

If you can still see me, maybe you can hear me—my experiences—and remember some of yours. Maybe you can recognize the flicker of hope that people seek when they come here, searching for softer ground. The same ground you once sought.

And maybe this letter will help us see each other—and then, finally, see the world beyond us.

Or perhaps our blood, the last thing we share, will boil over and evaporate, leaving silence and space behind.