I know I should be prepared for this day. I know I should be happy. But what I should be and what I am are in different time zones.

 

I flashback to the first day of kindergarten. It was the reverse of what I just witnessed. On her first day, she started crying, and she wouldn’t let go of me. She was a stubborn and clever little kid. Just five minutes after I dropped her off to her teacher, she faked a stomach ache, knowing she would get to come back home and see me. It was the first time we’d ever separated, and I was the one telling her it would be okay. I was the one having to let her go.

 

But I just dropped her off to her first day of college, and this time, she was the one telling me it would be okay. She was the one letting me go. I was the one trying to come up with reasons why I could turn around and go back. I was trying to think of things of hers she may have forgotten back home that would give me an excuse to go back. I wasn’t her though. I was bad at it. I wasn’t good at it like her. If I were the kindergartener, I never would’ve pulled off the stomach ache like she had. She was the one going to school for acting, not me. 

 

Now I knew what it felt like. Before, I knew what it was like to be the one leaving, but now I was the one being left. They were two completely different feelings. 

 

It was different when I dropped her off to kindergarten. I knew I would be back to pick her up. But now that I dropped her off to a new city and I wouldn’t see her for months, now I didn't know for sure when the next time I would see her would be. 

 

Kindergarten was just four hours, that was it. But what I hadn’t thought about was that for her five-year-old self, four hours felt like an eternity. She was like a puppy who didn't know for sure that I would be back. She was being dropped off with all these strangers she didn’t know. She didn’t know if she’d be safe. She was trusting me.

 

And now I guess it was my turn to trust her. To let her explore and be with her friends and be with herself. 

 

I thought I had it together, I really did, but it was after I drove back home and came back to the empty house that I completely fell apart. 

 

I went to her room. It was so quiet. I was so used to her playing her music too loud, and I would never tell her this, but I actually missed yelling at her to turn it down. It felt weird not needing to say that. 

 

She had taken her speaker with her to her dorm on campus. She left only the pieces of her she’d grown out of. She left the dresses that were too small to fit her anymore. She left her seven dwarfs that her father and I had shedded sweat, blood, and tears tracking down for her. She left behind all her posters that had each symbolized a phase she had gone through. The Twilight phase. The Justin Bieber phase. She went through them all. 

 

Her room still smelled like food, from the times she’d get upset during dinnertime and run up to her room and finish her meal there. She had been sensitive, and it had been a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing in that she felt everything so deeply and was such a great friend. She always thought of other people before herself. But it was a curse when she had to feel pain as deeply as she felt love. 

 

There were a lot of tears shed in this bedroom, but I just hoped that she could still remember the laughter, too. I remember when she would have sleepovers, she’d be laughing up a storm in there. When I subtly texted her to please be quieter since her father and I had work in the morning, she’d tell me they were doing TikTok dances. And then I would make all her friends and her laugh even more when I asked them what TikTok was and they had to explain it all to "elderly" me.

 

There was a day I remember I heard her crying in her room and I went in to ask her what was going on, and she showed me the hurtful things people were saying about her online. 

 

It was the night she told me she wanted to try out therapy. At first, I regret to say I asked her why. I didn’t think she needed it. There was nothing wrong with her. There was no way she had depression, because I would’ve known it. I wasn’t the type of mother that missed things like that.

 

It quickly distanced us. She felt like I didn’t understand her.

 

It started when I saw the cuts on her wrists one night, and I yelled at her. I tried to fix her when she only wanted me to listen.

 

One day I did listen, and she told me everything. We hugged, and I tried therapy myself. We tried it together, and it changed me. I learned so much from her. 

 

There were so many memories in her room. When I had to leave her room and shut the door, I was worried the memories would all go away, that I would forget my little girl who was no longer little. 

 

But I closed my eyes, leaning my back against her door, and I remembered what I told her the first day I dropped her off to kindergarten. “I’ll see you soon,” I told her.

 

She’d told me the same thing when she got all settled into her dorm. 

 

She was the mom now, and I was the little kid, and the next four years would feel like an eternity just like those four hours of kindergarten did for her. 

 

But eventually she would pick me up.