A Thousand Ways To Run

W a r r e n

I watched Charlie slowly disappear into the tunnel. Once she was out of sight, I felt my body physically slump. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is total bullshit. If anything, it just got worse.

I got back home okay after taking a passageway I only used for emergency purposes. It involved trekking through the water system for a few blocks before taking a much longer, winding tunnel that was a few feet shorter height-wise. Sitting in my bed, I straightened up fully and felt a disturbing crack in my back. Thank God it wasn’t a sewer line.

I had slept horribly that night, tossing and turning to the point where I took ten minutes to search for some Nyquil just to get me through to the next day.

I guess a lot of people know about the whole phenomenon/idiom of the calm before the storm. I’ve felt it, how the wind changes and the air gets so still you swear you could float in it like water. And then, claps of lightening and bone jumbling thunder rings out, and it’s like the world is a firecracker which fuse has burned down. The calm is one of the best parts of any storm, because it gives us something to compare the storm too. It’s like mother nature isn’t content with her ‘monthly gift’ label, and just wants everyone to see how big she is, how destructive.

Waking up the next morning, I knew I was supposed to be in the calm period. No one in the house was awake yet, and everything had gone normally. The sun rose, the dew gathered on the grass, the coffee pot in the kitchen stirred to life with its wretched bubbling and gurgling. No one knew yet, no one suspected that she was gone. And yet every single one of my nerves wouldn’t calm down as if I expected a troop of Secret Service agents to bust down my door any second. And it was completely and utterly annoying as hell.

I sat at the breakfast table with droopy eyes and birds nest hair, gulping down my Lucky Charms because I was too impatient to wait for the chef to make an omelet. Mom and dad acted completely as I imagined they would, avoiding all forms of conversation and recognition to my existence. Which was fine by me.

The only problem was that the calm period doesn't usually last like, a whole. Freaking. Day.

A whole day spent wandering around, trying to study and failing, attempting to play catch with myself in the backyard, online chess games and various other video games. A whole day of weird stressful and nervous yet calm tension that could drive a person mad. All in all, just too many oxymorons for me to handle. I seriously began to wonder what I’d done before Charlie came. Oh yeah, I rotted in seclusion for like, two years.

I started to try to count the hours since she’d been gone; I’m sure she would have figured it out so much faster. In our quiet conversations, what few we’ve had before she finally let her walls down, she had let slip some very personal things. She told me about her horrifying childhood, a few of the places she’d been, and some of the smallest things about her I noticed myself. She had the strangest nervous habit, Charlie just calculated things. I hated to see it happen, how she just started spewing out facts about how long it’s been since I walked in the room, how many times I’d glanced down at her lips or how often she smiled. Some were happy, others just rash and... I just couldn’t quite explain how I hated to see her do it. Because it usually meant she was trying to shut off the part of her that’s human. Like she actually wants to revert to a robot. It just serves as a reminder of her past that she’s turned on, a part of her that can’t be uninstalled.

But I kept counting, nevertheless, because I knew she must have been, too. And somehow, that made me feel better.

Sometime around forty and a half hours after she left, lightening struck.

Just like the shifting of the air into a calm, I felt it jolt right into the storm. Whatever math problem I had been solving, was forgotten immediately when I heard the voices and the yelling as pairs of feet stomped around hallways. I dropped my pencil and stood up from the desk, moving to listen through the crack in the door. I hoped they’d only just discovered she was gone, and prayed I wouldn’t hear her voice fighting back.