When I Turn 18

Synopsis

On my eighteenth birthday, the sky was a dull shade of gray. It wasn't a cloudy day; it was that kind of oppressive feeling that seeped right into people's bones, like the air had been filtered by The Dominion Network—cool, restrained, stripped of all emotion. The city was eerily quiet, like a bottomless well where people kept jumping in, but not a single sound ever made its way back out. I stood at the entrance of the Identity Registration Hall, next to a line of other expressionless eighteen-year-olds, all neatly dressed in white shirts. It was as if we were prisoners who already knew what sentence awaited us, but we were too powerless to resist.