RUN ✔️

Chapter Seventeen.

November 4th, Sunday.
Chapter Seventeen.
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'...Family is not an important thing. It is everything...'

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"What number is your house again?" Calvin called out from inside the car in the driver's seat.

Half of my body was hanging out of the back car window as I glanced around the familiar town slowly passing by us.

There's where I had my first job!

Mrs Penny's Ice-cream shop. She served the best handmade chocolate ice-cream ever.

And here's the movie theatre where my family and I used to go to once a month for family night... Until everyone moved out of course.

And there's the town library. Oh, how I miss that library. Now it's just a memory, having been ruined and destroyed by vandals as there was now a giant penis on the front doors. I used to hide away in its aisles reading for hours, probably having read half of the books within walls as it wasn't a big library.

For the first sixteen years of my life, I shared a room with one of my sisters, until my brother moved out. And Savannah's punk music was always blaring too loudly for me to concentrate with so I either had the choice of going to the treehouse my dad had built us in the backyard to relax or do my homework or even read a book. But when that was occupied by my brother using it as his hookup spot, I chose to go to the library. It was my safe space.

Oh, and there was where my first friend lived! Jenny Kanovie was her name. She ditched me in the sixth grade for the popular group at school, around the time when I started having a hard time at home. I desperately needed a friend, and I thought it was her because we'd been best friends since pre-school, but she clearly never cared enough about me and abandoned me at the first chance she could.

I think, if the rumors were true, that she got pregnant at sixteen and dropped out of school. I haven't heard anything from her since, pre-apocalypse that was. I do hope that escaped unscathed and was now living a luxury life somewhere far away from here.

Everyone does that though, don't they? They always leave when it gets too hard for them. Not you, them. It's sad, but it is a harsh reality of the world that we live in... Or lived in, more like it.

We drove past my old high school, the bowling alley, the local supermarket and the tennis court where everyone used to hang out after school and on weekends, getting drunk or high as a party always seemed to be raging around there.

Each of these places now had one thing in common, minus the memories each of them held for me and that was...

That they were all empty. They'd all been raided and vandalized. They were all... Destroyed. Shells of the life they used to hold and the meaning they used to have.