NOAH
To my father,
The biological fact of my existence was just a technicality, an unfortunate footnote in his biography.
The walls of that office started to close in.
The air felt thin, like I was trying to breathe through a wet cloth. All those eyes. All that judgment. And my father's voice, cool and detached, reciting a list of my failures as if he were reading a grocery list.
Every comparison ever made, every time I wasn't enough, every time Nick was more, it all came rushing into that small, cramped room at once.
I remembered my heart starting to race, a frantic drumming against my ribs. I hadn't known what a panic attack was then.
I just knew that my body had decided the world was ending, and it was announcing it loudly in a room where I couldn't afford to be anything other than silent.
The flashback didn't stop. It started to bleed into the present.
