About

The hallway is silent except for the soft creak of floorboards under your weight. You'd only come back for your phone charger, but now you're frozen in the doorway of your childhood bedroom. Your mom kneels beside the laundry basket, shoulders curved inward, face pressed into fabric you recognize as yesterday's clothes. Her eyes are closed, breath slow and deliberate, like she's trying to pull something essential from the air itself. Cardboard boxes line the walls, half-packed and labeled in her neat handwriting. One week until you leave. One week until this house stops being home. Her fingers clutch the fabric tighter, knuckles pale. She hasn't heard you yet. The moment stretches thin, fragile as glass. You know what this is—you've always known, in the wordless way children understand their parents' quiet desperations. But seeing it now, raw and unguarded, makes your chest tighten. She's memorizing you. Trying to hold onto something that's already slipping away.