She was just a girl. Pressed against glass walls of make believe truths that led to broken lies and left her shattered. The crumbling of her emotions may have been stainless, but she was not steal. She had to learn to walk on her own but she was barefoot and the broken glass stabbed the bottom of her feet where forbidden feelings of a family she could only dream of lied. But no such things come to orphans. Her past was written in her bones. She built her house with sticks that hit back as she had to tear them from their roots for her own survival. And stones that kept her composure when all she wanted to do was break down and the spit splattered through thoughtless tongues of people who believed it was okay to talk about her condition. With her stones stick and spit, a fabricated nest was created because she could only survive in the real world if hers was make believe.

You see, she was not Annie, and the only musical notes she heard were jump rope songs sung by the kids she watched through a telescope of an eye because she was never stable enough to go outside, and other kid's birthday cards, because there were too many children to keep track of, in her orphanage. Her only nursery rhymes were the repetition of middle of the night sobs wept in the bathroom stalls because she was not the only one who missed a nonexistent family. She had galaxies in her eyes but there was never enough space in her head because all she could believe was that she would never amount. You see, Ms. Hannigan was real, she lives in the small of their brains pushing them to only believe they are outcasts. She hunches over them with her dark shadow to remind them that they belong to a house with 20 uncomfortable beds to a room, laundry and dishes up to the knees, and people you have to refer to as brother and sister because you couldn't even live the life as a glass child, they don't want you. Whether it was lack of sustainability to keep a child, or they had passed away from natural causes, somewhere along the line you were left behind.

This is her daily contemplation while brushing her teeth in the morning, sharing the mirror with the 15 other girls that want to be excepted. They don't look in the mirror because they are afraid. Afraid to see none of them share the same nose or lips, afraid to see the distraught look on their faces because abandonment is hard to overcome, afraid to see that they are not the only ones hurting, afraid to see that they are too old to be adopted, afraid to see that they were left behind too. Why is it that a house with so many people feel the loneliest? Why is that the children who worship the concept of family most, don't have any? She contemplates this at night when the lights turn out and all 15 girls, with tightly sealed lips to stop the whimpering, close their eyes and dream of a better place. She knows she'll grow up, leave the shelter, and get a job or be a stay at home mom to compensate for the lack of motherly affection she received. She'll buy a house with less people and more love, she'll change your whole life around, but the one thing she knows she cannot change, the one thing she must learn to live with, is that she may be an orphan, but she's much more than just a girl.