Graduation morning arrived bright and unreasonably warm, the kind of June day that made the whole gray, complicated winter feel like it had happened to someone else entirely.
I stood in front of my mirror for longer than necessary, smoothing the front of my gown, watching the girl in the reflection the way I used to watch other people through a camera lens, carefully, from a slight remove, trying to understand what I was actually looking at.
She looked tired in the way that came from a real year, not the manufactured exhaustion of too little sleep, but the deeper kind that came from actually living through something instead of managing it from behind glass. She also looked, for the first time in longer than I could remember, entirely unhidden. No careful angle. No door left open just in
