The line connected on the second ring.
“Hey,” my best friend said.
“Everything okay?”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak.
I was sitting on the folding cot on the sunporch, staring through the open doorway at the bedroom that used to be mine.
Marla’s clothes were stacked neatly on my old bed.
Down the hall, the house was silent because the people who lived there were somewhere else, celebrating Leo while I folded their laundry.
My phone still showed the money Mom had sent me, as if rejection could be itemized and reimbursed.
I swallowed.
“Is that project in Seattle still on?”
There was a pause.
“Yes,” my friend said.
“We’re leaving tomorrow.”
I looked around the sunporch.
The cot.
The plastic drawer where I kept my clothes.
The small lamp I had bought myself because nobody had thought about whether the porch was bright enough to read at night.
The blanket I folded every morning so the room wouldn’t look messy when everyone walked past it.
For months, I had treated that space like temporary housing.
Suddenly I understood that the only temporary thing had to be me.
“Do you still have room for me?” I asked.
“Xena, I asked you three times.
Of course we do.”
Her answer came so easily that it hurt.
No lecture.
No sigh.
No calculation about whether my presence would inconvenience somebody else.
Just room.
“Then I’m coming.”
She went quiet again, but this silence was different.
“Are you sure?”
I looked at Marla’s open bedroom door.
“Yes.”
That was the first decision I had made in a long time without asking myself how my family would feel about it.
After we hung up, I sat still for several minutes.
Part of me expected panic to arrive.
It didn’t.
I opened the small closet beside the sunporch and pulled out an old suitcase.
It had dust around the wheels.
I wiped it with one of the towels Mom normally expected me to use for cleaning and placed it on the cot.
Then I began packing.
I didn’t take much because, despite living there my entire life, I didn’t have much that felt completely mine.
Clothes.
Shoes.
My laptop.
Chargers.
A few books.
Toiletries.
The folder containing my identification and personal documents.
That folder made me stop.
For years I had kept important things wherever Mom told me to keep them.
Birth certificate in one drawer.
School records in another.
Documents tucked into a cabinet everyone used.
That night, I gathered every piece that belonged to me and put it together.
It wasn’t dramatic.
