“I’m going West, you should come.”

It was a cold winter morning in Connecticut. Sonya Cotton looked out over the frozen lake as her mind flooded with visions of the open road. Her best friend continued: “It would be good for you, to get away for a while.” The timing felt like a sign, a call to rise after a year of tumult.

Over the past year, Sonya watched as the most important and defining loving relationships around her, including her own, dissolved. Reeling from the dismantling of these unions, she felt herself the victim as well as the perpetrator of a great deal of destruction and betrayal. Living in the suburbs of the northeast, she perceived this destruction paralleled in the dead animals along the roadside that she passed every day. She saw herself and loved ones in the dead deer: innocent, inflicted upon, and disregarded. She also saw herself and loved ones in the perpetrators of their deaths: self-consumed, unconscious, and untrustworthy.

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