Becoming

Venturing into public where people looked at her in anger, the spaces strangers took up, too close to her body. Entering a public space meant accepting the looks of strangers, their eyes on her, as if her body were theirs to take.

            Her skin crawled as sweat from her palms transferred over to the store basket she was carrying. She could feel her lungs squeezing out each breath and inhaling for another as she paced the store quickly.

            The gazes of strangers stuck to her body as she left the store. Entering the threshold of the apartment door, the gazes peeled off her like a dirty sticker unable to stick anymore.

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            Cool nights sat with her patiently; distant laughter seeped into her walls. The laughter is coming from Todd and Walley's, the town's bar.

            Dedbur was an intimate place where each car was recognizable to neighbors and friends, and any foreign vehicle was noticed and deemed a tourist or a driver passing by.

            She had moved here after a series of anxiety attacks over several years.

            "Moving to a small town won't fix you. Therapy and exposure will," her best friend had said, trying to convince her to stay in the only place they'd known since childhood.

            It didn't work.

            Now she stood alone in a town full of strangers.