On my sixteenth birthday, I found my mother’s body in a cockroach-infested motel room we had been staying in. I would no longer have to care for her, work forty hours a week to support us both, have to fight off the men that thought I would be a sweet indulgence after she had passed out. I stared at her pale, thin body for over an hour—a hollow, lifeless shell. Four empty needles were stuck into her arm. I packed up our things and walked to a pay phone to call 911. That was the last I ever saw of my mother, and I vowed to never be like her.
