"I'm an onion girl, like that song Holly Cole sings, and what I'm most afraid of is if you peel back enough layers there won't be anything left of me at all. Everyone will know who I really am. The broken girl, the hollow girl. Maybe the stories can fill me up. So...Once Upon a Time..." -Charles DeLint I'm an open book, that's hard to know. Just keep peeling back Layers of masks, Stories that reveal and conceal, That hold me in, Make me real. A fleshy skin to hide within. Just keep peeling. Keep looking at my diversions As I run off to play. I found life in the far away. Flights of fancy, Parallel realities, The dreams I danced beyond to, The stories that filled my hollow shell, That animated the broken pieces With golden magic, With life, and hope, and will, A liquid force I drank into my dried up cracks, A deep well of strength I drew upon. Just keep peeling. Find my precious scars. Find the truths that are hard to see. Find the me that dreams, and loves, and shines Beyond the breaking. "We are all onions. Layers upon layers of stories waiting to be unraveled. We all have a breaking point, but it's what we do after that defines us". -Charles Delint This poem and sculpture explores identity as something layered, storied, and continually in formation. Rather than treating fragmentation or brokenness as absence, it considers imagination and storytelling as vital forces—ways of inhabiting the self when certainty is unavailable. Here, stories are not distractions from reality, but vessels of survival, offering continuity, repair, and the courage to keep becoming. The act of “peeling” is not a search for a final, essential core, but an invitation to recognize the depth, resilience, and luminosity held within all that has been lived.