“What They Left Behind”

“I was two, but I still felt the empty rooms.”

I don’t remember the day they left. I don’t remember a slammed door or a suitcase or even a goodbye. But I remember the feeling. It’s strange how even when you’re too young to understand words like “abandonment” or “custody,” your body still knows something is missing. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I felt it in the way the air seemed colder… in the way I kept looking for faces that never appeared.

People like to say “you can’t miss what you never had.” But that’s not true. I missed the parents I was supposed to have. The bedtime stories. The birthday cakes. The arms that would catch me when I ran too fast. I missed the version of my life that could have been, the one I only knew in my imagination. After they left, the world didn’t stop to help me figure it out. I was shuffled between people, between rooms, between different versions of “home” that never quite felt like mine. Court dates came and went. Grown-ups whispered over my head like I was too small to notice. But I noticed everything — especially the silences.

And in those silences, questions grew.
Why didn’t they want me? Was I too loud? Too needy? Too much?
Or maybe… not enough?

Even as I grew older, the absence stayed. It wasn’t loud anymore — it was quiet and constant, like a shadow that never left my side. It showed up when I saw kids holding their mom’s hand in the grocery store. When my friends had their dad cheering in the crowd at school events. When people asked me about my parents, and I had to choose between the truth and a polite lie.

The truth is — they didn’t just leave the house.
They left parts of me I’ve been trying to find ever since.

But I’m still here.
And maybe that’s the part they didn’t see — that I could survive the empty rooms.