After No One Showed Up to My Graduation My Mom Asked for $2,100 and I Gave Her a Response She Didn’t Expect

brass lock cylinder from my first apartment, the one the locksmith replaced the day I sent a dollar to my mother and changed my life. It is tarnished and scratched and genuinely ugly, and it is the most important of the three. It is not a symbol of locking them out. It is a symbol of the moment I chose to let myself in.

People ask sometimes, when I continue reading …