I was twenty-two when my life split cleanly in two—into before and after.
Before, I was a college student with a boyfriend who promised we were building something together. After, I was standing on a sidewalk with one suitcase and a positive pregnancy test folded in my pocket, listening to him say I had “ruined everything.” He didn’t shout. That somehow made it worse. He just opened the door, set my bag outside, and closed it like I was a mistake he could erase.
I went to my parents next. I thought blood meant safety. I was wrong. My mother cried, my father stared at the floor, and they told me I’d made my choices. They said coming home would only “encourage irresponsibility.” I remember nodding like I understood, then walking back out into the cold with nowhere left to go.
The building janitor found me sitting on the stairs that night.
His name was Mr. Alvarez. He was in his late fifties, with tired eyes and hands rough from decades of work. I’d seen him every day, pushing his cart down the halls, nodding politely. We’d never really talked. When he asked what was wrong, something in his voice—quiet, steady—made me tell the truth.
He didn’t ask questions. He just said, “Come on,” and unlocked the door to his small basement room beneath the building. It had one bed, a table, a hot plate, and a single lamp that hummed when you turned it on. It wasn’t much. But it was shelter.
I stayed there for weeks. He gave me the bed and slept on the floor. He made soup and left it on the table without comment. Some nights, when the fear got too loud, he’d sit nearby and talk about nothing—weather, old movies, the pigeons that gathered outside the loading dock. He never judged me. He never told me what I should have done.
