The titanium is visible.
It’s mine.
A part of what I survived.
On my desk there is one framed photograph.
It isn’t one of my magazine covers.
It isn’t an award ceremony.
It isn’t a photograph of one of our biggest buildings.
It’s me at seventeen.
Sitting on Aunt Sarah’s porch.
My old aluminum crutches beside me.
Smiling.
On the back, Sarah wrote:
“This girl has no idea how high she’s going to fly.”
That photograph matters more to me than any trophy.
Because every time I look at it, I remember the truth it took me decades to understand:
The people who abandoned you during the storm do not get to decide your value once you reach the sunshine.
My parents thought losing a leg made me damaged.
They eventually learned that the only truly broken thing in our family had never been my body.
