UNFIT

When I was younger, I used to sneak out of bed to watch the news.

My mother’s only time to unwind came after my sister and I had gone to sleep. What she didn’t know was that I had memorized the floorboards, the ones that groaned under pressure and the ones that stayed silent. I would count to sixty, five times over, just to be sure. Then, tiptoeing across the room, I balanced on the quiet spots like a tightrope walker. Step by step, I made my way to the third stair on the staircase, just high enough to see the living room, where my mother sat bathed in the glow of the television.

The screen flickered, casting shifting shadows across the walls. School portraits of girls and women flashed before my eyes, some smiling, others stiff and formal like passport photos. Parents with tear-streaked faces stood before seas of microphones. Men in chains shuffled forward under the watchful eyes of officers. Judges brought their gavels down with a decisive crack, sentencing them to lives behind bars. Some wept. Some screamed. Some didn’t flinch at all.

The stories bled into one another. A chorus of words, each beginning with the letter M:

Murderer.Mutilated.Missing.Monster.

I was afraid.

Before bed, I triple-checked the locks, yanked on the windows to make sure they were shut tight. I scrutinized every man I passed, those with wild, unkempt beards and those clean-shaven in suits with briefcases in hand. There was no pattern. No way to predict who might be dangerous. That uncertainty haunted me. How could I protect myself if I didn’t know who to fear?

But more than anything, I feared for my mother. She worked in a wine factory, one of the only women on the line, surrounded mostly by men. She never spoke of them being cruel or unkind, but that didn’t reassure me. After all, the “nice guys” weren’t always just nice.

And then, one night, something shifted. I noticed a pattern in the missing girls. None of them looked like me. None had hair like mine, or skin like mine. They weren’t colored. They weren’t dark-skinned.

A switch flipped in my brain.

Did that mean I was safe? That these real-life monsters didn’t want me?

I won’t lie—I felt relief. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I grieved for those white girls who had vanished. But I stopped worrying about my sister. I stopped worrying about my mother.

As I got older, that illusion shattered. Reality hit me like a brick to the chest. Girls like me were disappearing too. Girls like me were being murdered at a disproportionate rate. The difference was, when we went missing, no one came looking. There were no televised search parties. No press conferences. No rallies.

The world didn’t see us.

And you can’t search for what you’ve never noticed.

That realization knocked the wind out of me. But sometimes the universe teaches through impact. Sometimes you have to be breathless before you understand what it means to fight for air.

Because survival is a fight. And if you don’t look out for yourself and your people, you’re no better than the ones who take your existence for granted.

So as you read this, remember: this story isn’t just mine. My other half struggles to tell hers, so I’ll tell it for her. But believe me, the pain is still real, maybe not as sharp as hers, but deep enough to break me.

The truth? This story was never really meant to be about me. Even though, at times, it might seem that way.

I didn’t want it to be. I tried to keep myself out of it.

But I couldn’t. Because after everything, after all the years of denial, I had to admit something:

My best friend is human. And I couldn’t tell her story without telling mine.And I couldn’t tell mine without talking about him.