In The Dead of the Night

15 | golden sun

Alive.

My father had always told me to be articulate, that precision of language was the most important skill for someone like me, but in that moment when I woke with his body against mine and the golden sun on our faces, there was no better word to describe how I felt than that.

Alive.

I had always taken being alive, breathing, sensing, as a kind of given. Not until that moment did I completely take it in, every single small beautiful and horrifying detail of being alive. Not until that moment did I realize that this morning might have been the best morning I would ever experience, that any morning was the best morning anyone could have experienced because I was alive in every sense of the word.

And that was before they found us.

Not them, but someone else.

I asked Shawn to braid my hair like he'd done just a few mornings ago when I'd felt like a completely different person while I played with his dark curls that I'd admired for so long. They felt so soft in between my fingers, almost as soft as his kisses that peppered my face that morning or his smile when I told he was good at braiding hair.

I drove the car that morning, through the remainder of the charred city and to another new city that for some reason didn't frighten me. There was something about how the sun lit so golden here that made me trust the place, and I never trusted anywhere unless it was in the dead of the night. And that's when we saw people again and we realized that in this place it was warm and we saw a man and a woman dressed in black uniforms with gold badges that looked like beacons of light in my eyes.

"Are you officers?" Shawn asked desperately as he jumped from the passenger's seat.

"Yes. And you are just in time," said the woman with a pleasant smile, "because the train is just about to leave. It's a 16 hour locomotive to the West Coast. Slow, but safe."

"Run, now," said the man, handing Shawn two very small pieces of something wrapped in tin foil. "The train is not far, but it's 11:57 and it's leaving at noon sharp."

He smiled, a wide, shimmering kind of smile that you didn't see often from people like Shawn Mendes, before letting it drop a little. "And my girlfriend can come with me, right?"

"Only if you hurry! We're evacuating everyone right now, so move along! Good luck, to you and your girlfriend."

He looked behind himself and saw me standing against the car door, taking my hand and instantly running like we had that night on the rooftop as it rained and rained and we flew higher and higher until we touched the painted clouds. We never saw that stolen yellow taxi again.

It was quite anticlimactic to reach the train door. There seemed to be not many people there, but I had guessed we were some of the only ones still stuck so far east. But it only felt anticlimactic for a few moments, because when he took my face in his hands and kissed me hard before stepping on our ticket to anywhere, it felt like the climax of any good film- marking the arrival of a peaceful, soft epilogue.

Only once we got on the train and learned that there was only one bed left on the entire locomotive did I realize that all of the commotion had happened earlier. These people that I saw apprehensive on thin white mattresses had been there for hours, not missing this ride for anything in their lives.

Shawn and I ran down the crowded aisles to the very last cart where our bed was. It was clear this train had once been an overnight train for people trying to get the experience of the picturesque mountains, but the back cart was without windows and had two layers of beds instead of one. When I climbed up to the bed that was a few feet above the person below us, I tucked myself beneath the plush white sheets and felt him follow behind me. His arms wrapped around my waist and I closed our little sliding door, creating the kind of silence that made my heart go steady again.