Chapter 4

March 30th||60° and cloudy||Skye

Today. Today. It hit me like a Colorado thunderstorm, hard and strong and sudden. Yesterday, so beautiful, and then came today.

I couldn’t help but notice that mom hadn’t left bed when I woke up for school. I almost convinced myself to crawl into her blankets, under the warmth and into the salty pillowcases, but it would’ve only made it worse to witness her blank expression firsthand.

Today.

I feel the knot tangle in my chest like a kitten’s ball of string, but I choke it down and throw on my runner’s garb. I hardly have enough time to jog, to release, before forced to face the world.

I stumble out into the morning’s dim light. The hypnotic ambience of the sky numbs me enough to allow my feet to pound the pavement. Left, right, left, right. I feel an ache in my bones, from my neck to my ankles, and the bubble of tears that threatens its way from my throat. But I can’t break, not today. One of us has to be strong today.

April thirtieth. Today.

In the end, it isn’t at all bad as I expected it to be. No one at school knows. Of course, my friends are hardly friends anymore; the broken relationships faded as my last three months of chaos ensued. They all recognize my dazedness as fatigue, or perhaps a trace of the summertime blues. Never will they remember this day; they don’t have it in them to.

Ah, how I envy that.

The worst part would’ve been returning to my mom flipping through photo albums with a mountain of tissues piled by her side, except that the barren garage clarifies her absence. I haven’t the slightest idea where my mother might be, but I accept it as a stroke of good luck, considering that I can’t comfort my own weeping mother, not today.

The skies are no longer gray.

As a novice avid runner, I can admit to being a bit of an addict. I began the habit of exercising about a month ago, and it does wonders in the emotional department. Once a day, every day, I love to feel the pavement pushing up against my feet, its pressure reaching my lungs and reddening my face.

Although I rarely exercise twice in one day, I can’t quite come to grips with staying home any longer. But even I can’t bring myself to run twice; my body is so exhausted from my sprinting this morning, plus the added weight of all the tedious end-of-year work I’m forced to do.

Tonight I can settle with a walk. Of course, by the time I get around to eating dinner and doing homework and cleaning dishes--suppressing my pent up tears and the strange urge to punch something all the while--the evening sun has called it quits, and most of the sky’s light has faded off.

An evening walk will do just fine.

Author's Note

How do you feel about Skye? What do you think is going on?