Mina

After I left home, I coped the way a lot of people do when they don’t know what else to do. I drank. I had a group of eight friends I’d grown close to after high school — people I saw every day, people who became their own kind of family when the original one had fallen apart.

And then I met Mina.

She was the first person who took me somewhere outside of myself. Before her, isolation was just the weather of my life — I had moved through it so long I stopped noticing it. But Mina changed the temperature of a room. We went to concerts together. We took long drives with music up and windows down. We existed in a world that felt lighter than anything I had known.

Being around Mina felt like freedom. The same word I had written at thirteen in that library, still finding me, still meaning something new.

She was in my life from seventeen to nineteen. And then she was gone.

Some people don’t stay, but they leave a mark on you that reshapes everything that comes after. Mina was one of those people.