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If you leave your home, a city known for vermin and corruption, you will accomplish more. If you go to a respected school, you can do whatever it is you want to do, once you figure out what you're passionate about. But if you're most passionate about your one surviving parent, you will shatter when he, too, leaves you.
When your father is murdered, it is an accident, a stray bullet finding a home in the person it hoped to protect, but you will feel it was predestined, practically spelled out in the stars the moment you were born. If your mother died as you took your first breath, your life effectively ending hers, does that make you a harbinger of death? When she tried to name you after sorrow and rage did she know it was your destiny to cause both? Or did she simply want you to always remember where you came from?
Josi isn't sure where the lines between pre-Manhattan and post-Manhattan Josi fused together into something moldy like spoiled milk. She's sure pre-Manhattan Josi was a girl full of cement between her ivory bones. The type of girl who had no need to rearrange her schedule to fit Wilson Fisk's. The type of girl who wore glitter above layers of glue like war paint. Buried her vices with the steel spikes of her cleats. Hit home runs like it was was nothing, had a string of paper dolls hanging from the ceiling like a revelry from girlhood, set things on fire just because she could, slowly spiraling to a place between lost and gone. She didn't have to live as someone else when the sun set, crawl into that shadow subspace in on the street corner with her ant vulnerability, her only personality trait wasn't weapon. A girl, a happy girl. The type of girl Peter Parker couldn't call a bad friend.
Post-Manhattan Josi passes time snapping her dog bone ankles in neon cities, enjoying the select freedom provided she stuffs what he asks for in between the void spaces of her rib cage and chews her self respect like a cyanide tablet. Slicing knuckles on mirrors she punches because she can't stand to see the face that isn't her face. Post- Manhattan Josi comes back from that neon city with silk sewn to her wrists like marionette strings. Pre-Manhattan Josi didn't smile and nod at whatever Kingpin tells her, post-Manhattan Josi does.
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