Sheena Ryder Lowtru ✦ < DELUXE >

Sheena looked at the photographs. She saw herself, but not herself. A girl with pigtails and a gap-toothed smile. A girl who still believed that love was something you could keep if you held on tight enough.

The “Ryder” came from her mother, a woman who left when Sheena was seven. “Ryder” was supposed to signify freedom, movement, the open road. Her mother had been a truck stop waitress with a tattoo of a winged wheel on her shoulder and a habit of disappearing for days at a time. When she finally left for good, she didn’t say goodbye. She just left a note on the kitchen table: “You’re a Ryder. You’ll understand someday.” Sheena never understood. She only learned that freedom, when it came from someone else, felt exactly like abandonment. sheena ryder lowtru

So Sheena Ryder Lowtru became a walking contradiction: the wanderer who never left, the truthful one who never spoke. Sheena looked at the photographs