On My 18th Birthday, My Parents Drove Me to the Ai…

No face appearing in the rear window. My parents drove away from me on my eighteenth birthday, and I stood outside an airport terminal holding a ticket to a place I had never been, abandoned so cleanly that for a moment I wondered if I had vanished rather than they had. People moved around me.

Wheels rattled over pavement. A man in a suit cursed at his phone. A child cried because she did not want to let go of her stuffed rabbit while her mother tried to zip a suitcase.

Automatic doors opened and closed, breathing warm air into the cold. I sat down on a bench near the curb. And I broke.

I will not make myself prettier in memory. I did not lift my chin with dignity. I did not decide then and there that I would survive.

I cried so hard my whole body shook. Ugly, open-mouthed crying. The kind that makes strangers uncomfortable because it asks too much of them.