There are years that don't leave you.
They stay — in the way you flinch at certain sounds, in the way you learned to smile when you were breaking, in the way you grew up before anyone realized you were still just a child.
This book is about those years.
It is about leaving home at twelve with a trunk full of things and no idea what was coming. About learning to sleep in a strange bed, eat in a crowded hall, and survive in a world that moved by bells and rules and the silent judgment of people who didn't really see you.
It is about loneliness that has no name. About falling apart quietly, so no one notices. About searching for yourself in a place that slowly made you forget who you were.
But it is also about the friendships that held you together when nothing else did. The laughter that somehow found its way through. The small, stubborn pieces of yourself you managed to keep.
This is a story about survival. About a girl who went through the fire and came out the other side — not unburned, but still standing.
Still becoming.