​It was around 2AM and I was staying up late absorbed in a haze of trashy reality TV, when my phone began to ring, pulling me out of my mindless indulgence. I looked at it to see HOME 2 plastered on the screen. It was my dad. Yes, it is a bit strange that my dad would be calling me at two o'clock in the morning, but for some reason, the uncommonness of this occasion didn't register within me. Too tired to play catch up with my dad and too involved in the romantic decisions of Antonio Sabato
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​If you had asked me then, I would have thought the day was insignificant. It was one of those un-special summer days in June, or maybe it was July of 2009, and I was lazily indulging in a mid-day nap when my mom woke me up to ask me if I'd like to join her and my brother for lunch. My initial impulse was to say 'no' on the basis that I was tired, but I hadn't seen my brother in quite some time and I thought it a good idea to go. And so my mom and I drove the hour and a half up to the Boston area where Blake was living and picked him up for an afternoon of food and conversation. When I saw him, I said hello, but I didn't hug him.  I didn't know when

It was as if he changed his mind over night or perhaps he was holding a tangle of secrets inside himself all along, but I was falling in love with him as the jumbled words of a breakup left his mouth. In various arrangements I have heard the sounds of different voices tell me all these words before. You see, I have this horribly destructive pattern of giving my heart to emotionally unavailable men. Men who will play with it, kiss it, pull at it and then hand the tattered pieces back to me; the most vulnerable part of me sitting in their hand and they decide that they don't want it. ​ As a  

I am sitting on my kitchen floor sobbing - those deep, painful, heavy sobs that come from my soul.  Tears crawl from the seams of my tightly shut eyes.  A serrated kitchen knife, clenched tightly in my right fist.  My left arm lays limp at my side, slits of scarlet decorating my wrist.  I'm alone, lonely, lost.  I'm a million different things I can't understand.  And so I cut myself so I don't have to try to figure any of it out. So I don't have to feel it.  Just for a moment I don't ​have to feel any of it.  I wish I could say that this was the only time​ I cut, that it was just somethingI flirted with, something I wanted to try and then I 

This is the third time that I have written and posted this preface–so technically it’s not the first post anymore, but it's the first one listed in a series of posts, which I'm deciding still justifies it as the beginning of whatever this blog will turn out to be. A Rusted Crown is meant to be an expression of who I am, and I’m not the same person who poured grapefruit vodka into her red wine while she wrote the last preface.  ​