Contributor(s): Author: Amy Harmon I won my first fight when I was eleven years old, and I\'ve been throwing punches ever since.
The girl who taught me that sometimes the biggest heroes go unsung and the most important battles are the ones we don\'t think we can win..
The girl I wanted to fight for, the girl I wanted to claim.
Why was it that no one saw her, yet she was the first thing I saw? If heaven was the octagon, then she was my angel at the center of it all, the girl with the power to take me down and lift me up again.
When they realized she wasn\'t normal, they hurried away.
No one seemed to see her at all, except for the few who squeezed past her, tossing exasperated looks at her unsmiling face.
I knew I loved her when I watched her stand perfectly still in the middle of a crowded room, people swarming, buzzing, slipping around her, her straight dancer\'s posture unyielding, her chin high, her hands loose at her sides.
I became something different.
Until I met Millie, and heaven became something different.
For me, heaven was the octagon.
It looked like the blur of screaming crowds and an opponent who wanted my blood.
It sounded like the bell at the beginning of a round, it tasted like adrenaline, it burned like sweat in my eyes and fire in my belly.
But for me, heaven was something else.
Where choirs sing and loved ones await.
Some people describe heaven as a sea of unending white.
Fighting is the purest, truest, most elemental thing there is.
Contributor(s): Author: Amy Harmon I won my first fight when I was eleven years old, and I\'ve been throwing punches ever since