Runaway

X. Home and Heart

I know I am not the person that I used to be.

I could face myself a little bit easier now. As signs off of the highway were pointing us home, as the surroundings became something I knew better than I knew myself, the things that I couldn’t admit to myself before were a little bit easier to think about. I didn’t think that the death of my mother would ever not hurt when I thought about it, but at least now I knew that I would live on, and everything would end up being okay.

My mother suffered from epilepsy. She didn’t have the seizures that often, but it was always so dangerous for her. She had to always be cautious; she lived in the terror that she had handed it down to one of her three children, but my brothers and I never showed the signs, and her worries about that slowly began to disappear. They were so unexpected and unpredictable that no one ever knew when it was going to happen, and it was always at the worst moment.

She died a month ago. Before that, it had been six months since her last seizure. She had jokingly told me at the hospital then that she had filled her quota for the year, and then had slipped me a wink.

Six months later, she had a seizure and then she was just . . . gone.

They actually had a name for it, and not a good one: Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy. SUDEP, for short. One second, we were standing in the kitchen and she was cooking and laughing, singing along to the radio. I was sitting on the counter and rolling my eyes at her. And then she dropped to the floor. And then she didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Nothing. I think I knew she was dead before I actually knew for sure.

And I saw that, every time I closed my eyes. I pictured everything normal, and then the next moment nothing would ever be normal again. It would be shattered.

I became afraid of that, for the last month. Well, I guess I still am. I don’t like the idea that something could be there normally and then is gone forever in the next second, faster than you could blink.

I hated death because it was final.

It might be a little foolish, but I did.

I saw how easily it happened and how quickly people were taken and it terrified me. I didn’t want to feel that pain again.

What I was trying to put into words was that I was afraid of living because that meant, eventually, I would die. And so would everyone else. That’s okay, though. I understand a little bit more now.

The only way to live it to live life to the fullest, and that’s what I plan to do.

The home I had run from just two weeks ago was less than twenty minutes away, and I didn’t want to run from it anymore.

I didn’t need to.

I can’t say that I was completely at peace with my mother’s death, but I was better than I was two weeks ago. Charlie might not have healed me completely, but he started the process, and that was all I needed for now. I needed the push to get back out into the world, to not be afraid of my own shadow.

I looked sideways at Charlie and bit my lip, wondering if he felt it too and what he thought about it.

Slowly, as if it were our hands, still linked together, I could feel both of us slowly letting go.

I had been with Charlie so long and I treasured every moment of it, but we both knew it wasn’t going to last, not when there was going to be so much distance between the two of us. He would be at the University of Florida in Gainesville and I would be in Saint Augustine, at Flagler College, and neither of us would have a car. We would be in two places starting two different lives and I don’t think either of us are going to convince ourselves otherwise by saying it wouldn’t tear us apart.