Where to begin? With the orange jumpsuit and strip search or with cutting all my hair off in a hotel room in Oregon? With being shackled to a bunch of other inmates and brought into court as a flight risk? Do I start with how the first lines of cocaine felt warm and welcome or do I begin later being four months pregnant and sleeping on a pull-out couch at my former drug supplier's apartment, the air thick with smoke as everyone else did what they were doing in the bedroom next door? Do I introduce backstory with the lover-roommate who went crazy and thought the floorboards were seeping water, crawling to the front door because he saw a person who wasn't really there? How many sensory details suffice to start with the Tarot card reading a then-friend gave me with swirls and whirls of the Tower and Death cards, predicting: If you don't stop what you're doing now, you're in for a torrent of pain? I didn't stop what I had been doing at the time of the Tower. A torrent of pain came. How predictable.What to include? The detritus, the free-floating memory bits don't seem to fit in anywhere, accrue no patterning. Can the disparate, fleeting images be placed into one thing at once? Or several things at once, a hybrid? I could speak of them abstractly, hint at passing around plates of cocaine after working a double at the restaurant. The plates I served could become a motif. I could offer exposition about leaving behind a contented albeit lonely life to enter a world of addiction and wild abandonment. A late bloomer. I didn't hit my rebel peak until my late twenties, when most good-natured gals like me were climbing up a ladder or marrying someone who was. My rational brain thought it a great idea to become a waitress and start writing full-time. Within four years I would be arrested in California for a DUI, beat an escalating addiction to cocaine, survive a two-year physically and mentally abusive relationship, and leave this torrent a solo parent with a 10-month-old son, only to resume my even lonelier life.Putting the words on this page—not seen again in a journal in case it got into the wrong hands as happened once, or twice—seems risky. Words attached to events I've closed off still exist along the nonlinear space–time continuum such that when I think long enough upon them, I am entirely transported. How do I bring readers there, too? I don't know if I should include all that.How will readers stumble upon a trauma? Embedded in a paragraph, artistically rendered, so it doesn't seem as jarring as it actually is, or as important? Oh, just here, nonchalantly going to say I can never go to Canada again because that country considers a drunk driving conviction as a felony. Or perhaps I can braid in a similar fact to say I had to wait 15 years to be able to legally drive in California again. Where to insert how I took the wheel for him, and so eventually my always-intoxicated alcoholic, abusive partner picked pregnant and very sober me up from the mandatory DUI school I had to attend weekly at Downtown Crossing, Boston? I should ask myself when is the right time to tell my now-teenage children about my arrest, right after I instruct again never ever to drink and drive, never ever to be like me? Or maybe I should divulge this relatively unknown loophole: My home state is one of four that does not corroborate with California, so that I drove back cross-country on a valid license. It wasn't until I moved out of state, years later, that I officially had my license revoked, which made getting to work and to day care and to life quite hard. I didn't embed that at all. It took up the whole paragraph.Time stamps are important, so readers have a sense of when and what and how. Offering a timeline might come in handy, from ages 29 to 32, say. At the end of that chronology, I had had enough of the waitressing, the partying all night, the drugs and alcohol, the disregard for practical life. I decided to upturn my world, drive cross-country to live in Portland, Oregon. I am a fan of sweeping grand gestures; beware the contriving fine line of sweeping grand gestures, even if “it really happened though.” I was on the rebound from a four-year back-and-forth unrequited romance and a double rebound from the lover-roommate who went nuts. I didn't want a relationship. I told him this. Neither of us listened to me.The night before I was to leave cross country, my little gray Ford Taurus packed window to window with anything I'd need and many things I wouldn't, my newly turned boyfriend took me out to dinner at our favorite Mexican-American restaurant. I had asked him to come on the trip with me, and he said no, that he would wait for me to return. I didn't have the heart to tell him the whole point of the trip was to preview Portland so that I could move there. [A future critical reading might dissect this very moment in the narrative to show readers the intersection of free will and fate.] My boyfriend was drunk and agitated, mumbling about a guy who looked at me at dinner and how it bothered him. I interpreted those facts as he was sad I was leaving. We bickered getting out of the car, and he threw his round aluminum take-out box against the sidewalk, or possibly against his own apartment door and the innards hit the sidewalk. I can't be sure. There was orange rice and black beans and a quarter triangle of a quesadilla dripping in sour cream and scallions wasted on the ground. Years later I'd remember this scene and laugh that I thought this was such a bad scene.In the morning I kissed him goodbye, and he rolled over and didn't respond. I should definitely elaborate on that. I was an hour on the road when he called me. Now he wanted to come, he said. So I turned around and picked him up.That simple act would define the trajectory of the rest of my life, and this particular story. That man gave me my son. And so, I cannot say I'd make revisions. Everyone will someday ask me why I stayed, if there were any signs beforehand. Well yes, but I misread the signs. And anyways, if I had listened to the crashing quesadilla as a precursor of crashes to come, then I wouldn't have the anything I have now. All narratives are alike: One thing leads to another thing and if you alter that one thing, you alter all the other things.To container or not to container? I like containers, but much like generic Tupperware, a writer must be careful of replication, as I've just done there with a very literal reference. Or the quasi container I'm currently enacting as if writing a craft essay to tell my own life's trauma. I prefer subtlety and that's a hard line when demanding a directed reading on a piece, like placing clear plastic film on the 1980s classroom microfiche projectors and writing on top of it with a blue wax pencil.If I were to use a container for this part of my story, however, I might choose a typewritten letter that's been whited out, an erasure. Like anyone's life, I can show only the flowery bits or I can tell you something happened to me in those years like a portal opened up and made me a different character for a while. Someone once afraid to try any drugs because her brother started hearing voices and entered a permanent psychosis after using cocaine suddenly took to it like morning coffee. Someone who lived all buttoned up afraid of being touched because she was touched too much by the schizophrenic brother suddenly started making out with anyone who danced with her. At a New Year's Eve party after ecstasy was no longer a new thing, I took my first bump of cocaine. And I woke up. The only way I know now that it was cut with something is that the distinct smell of granular Cascade dishwasher detergent makes my mouth water with a salty bleach-like trickle at the crease of my throat. Which I can't say I dislike. For two tables’ worth of tips a bag, an acquaintance of an acquaintance would dip into the lounge at the restaurant I worked at, make eye contact, and meet up over by the jukebox or register or chip bin. I'd pretend I was filling more chip baskets and drop the tightly wound plastic bundle of happy into one of three pockets of my black apron and keep it there all night. I had no idea the rules of the game I was playing. I thought hardly anything of it at all, as if I had just bought a cigarette off a customer. I didn't hide it much, didn't worry about it popping out when I handed someone the bill folder, which I also kept in my apron, or a pen, or a stray straw. Eventually I'd be untwirling the little pack with smudges of guacamole or hot sauce on it every time I went to the bathroom, a bump here, a bump there. A line before work, a plate of lines after work. Sure, mix it with some Adderall and make the first initial of all our names and watch as I go first and snort the J with a rolled bill. Fun. I was having fun. More fun than I had ever dared to allow myself in all my damn life. This was life. This was the other side of fear and abuse. This was thinking I'd faced all my demons and being empowered and free. Things happened though. My best friend's husband overdosed on their basement stairwell. The drug dealer who supplied this side of the city was sent to jail. I stayed up too late. I spent all my money on being happy. I pretended to be a writer if anyone asked. I couldn't get enough of the stuff and by 5 a.m. my heart was pumping past its capacity. Every night I'd pray to God to not let me die and promise to take it easy the next night. Which I didn't. The lover-roommate went crazy, shipped off to rehab down South. My other roommates had long gotten out, engaged even, moved out of state. I gave up my apartment. I had nowhere to live. I made the decision to date another guy who would turn out to cause a very predicable catastrophic denouement. Take that entire portion and white out everything except the words “Eventually this life empowered my heart, I promise.”Protect yourself from triggers. That's what all trauma writers advise. I will also advise this, but seeing I am a porous sea sponge of emotions, I cannot in good faith offer any tried-and-true tools.Create scenes just like fiction. When telling your story, remember to create whole characters, use plot, enact scenes. I forget to do this. I get wrapped up in making meanings. From my cell on the second tier of the women's correctional facility at Marin County Jail in San Rafael, California, I had a perfect viewing of the woman's naked body as she rubbed lotion into every crevice and onto every portion of her skin until it glistened gold. Her gaze met mine more than once. She wanted me to see and I wanted to look. Her big belly protruded at least seven months, and even though her cell was right next to the guard station so they could keep watch on her, the only one watching was me. She never came out of her cage for the two days I would be imprisoned, her dark green jumper for murder-like crimes tossed on her cot. My orange outfit a wimpy counterpart. The California of my memory, having lived in Burbank and traveled to Wine Country and San Francisco several times throughout my life, could never have conjured this scene.If ever there was a time I faked it till I made it, this was it. I had just the week before while on a cross-country road trip with my rice-slinging boyfriend cut off all my hair with a blunt pair of scissors. My shoulder-length scraggly brown hair that so easily fit into a ponytail now lay in the hotel sink. We were traveling down to Crescent City, California, the next day, through the sycamores and trees as big as dinosaurs. I wanted to leave my DNA behind because I did not like Portland, after all. It emitted a dark aura, heavy and sad. I knew the minute I entered its city limits that I could not live there. How do I show not tell the way a place can mirror a narrator's interior? Would dialogue make the intangible actionable, move the scene's plot along: “She didn't belong anywhere,” I said. I knew my attempt at leaving my old life for a brand-new one 3,000 miles away was failing daily. And so I tried to engender, manifest a new beginning. I cut my hair off. So dramatic. Such a grand gesture. I tossed it off the PCH into the cliffs and hopefully into the Pacific Ocean. I like to think it's there still, weaved into a fish's home like the little mermaid who repurposed human things. Also, if I were to die, something of me would remain.Now, that blunt-cut hair, the tattooed clock at 11:11 on the back of my head and neck, my despondent stare—all of it served me well in a women's prison. How curious to realize I truly become accustomed to all of my environments. Somewhere in the dredges of The Things I Keep is the Marin County state-issued toothbrush they gave me upon intake. Off-white, ribbed at the handle, and collapsible in half. I used up the travel-sized toothpaste. The tiny soap. I never asked to see the pregnancy test.How to end an essay on trauma? There is no end, of course. Years from any designated beginning or flashback or scene there will be little tremors, afterquakes. Every time I see a spork, the kind handed out at KFC, for instance, I remember the prison guard who chased me down the dinner line because I didn't throw it out, as if the mini plastic tines could shank or dig. Every time I see bruises forming, I hear glass breaking against walls. Every time I lock my door at night. Tuck my kids into bed. Brush my teeth.It is much easier, as it turns out, to begin an essay on trauma than it is to end one.