Rowan: The EcoPan

The Argument Of Eden

[Two Days Later]
I round another corner, my hands scraping against the rough bark of a tree to stable myself so my feet don't slip out from under me. I don't slow down though. I can feel my blood pumping, my heart beating, and my chest heaving against the strain of running so much. I'm pushing myself to the limit and that means a lot coming from me. I just ignore the miserable feeling of being out of breath and enjoy the feeling of having a body again! The very thought of it makes me let out a bursting laugh. My mind didn't feel the twelve years, but my body sure did. I'm still itching for activity after three days.

I pump my arms (my shoulders starting to ache as well) and keep running as fast as my legs can take me. The sound of my own stomping footsteps sounds like a stampede as the vibrations run up my body to my skull. I think that's why I always liked running. It silenced the world, making everything including my thoughts quiet. It took emotional pain and turned it into physical pain in a productive way. Well, now my thoughts are almost too loud to silence. Still, this is better.

As I get trapped in my own thoughts I let my animal instincts take over and I'm mindlessly running from my problems. I'm not sure if this is a healthy way of handling things. It probably isn't, considering I'm literally trying to run away from my problems. I shift my weight, dodging to my left to avoid an obstacle I've made up of my mind. I've always done this though. When I was young my mom always had me do drills and tests to see how fast I could run or hide, but at around fourteen or fifteen it was so much more than that for me. It was a coping mechanism. I remember this old poem from prefail days that I used to love, Ash said it reminded him of me. I grew fond of the poem and still remember every line of it despite not being a literature person. You see, Ash was always good at things like language arts, or English, the kind of stuff that took creativity. I'm good at painting and sketching but I was never creative in a classroom setting. I was better at strict things like science and math. There's only one answer to things like that, it's not complicated. The poem is The Rider by Naomi Shihab Nye. It was written a few hundred years before the ecofail, in the nineteen hundreds or something like that, I'm not sure. That was a vague and largely untalked about time in history compared to the rest. The only reason Ash even read that old poem was that he was such a literature junky. Either way, the poem was always a good way to describe me.

Suddenly, my foot gets caught on the root of a tree. I go toppling down, face first and my chin meets a devastating blow to the ground. I grimace, scrambling back to my feet with a limp. I touch my chin and my fingers come back bloody. I fell so hard my head starts to feel blurry from the impact. I brush the dirt off of my pants, limping forward. I see a body of water ahead of me and I hobble towards it.

"Bik!" I curse.

If only you could keep your temper in check, Yarrow sighs. I almost chuckle.

When I reach the lake I take my shirt and pants off, easing into the freezing water. I go into the water up to my neck and close my eyes, thinking over everything that happened the last few days, the last twelve years.

My brother is married with babies, I can get used to that as strange as it is with time. Lark is married and as painful as that is, I'll be okay. She's happy and that's the most important thing to me. Harmonia is no longer a city. Now, what used to be Harmonia is called Rowanna, after me. Lachlan got to pick the name...speaking of Lachlan. I honestly can't blame him for anything that he's done these past twelve years. More than anything, I pity him and Lily. Lily is beautiful but she looks so tired and sickly. Lachlan walks around the castle with a frown and his eyebrows furrowed, he's always angry. And in the end, they just aren't a happy couple. I see them walking around and they both seem so numb like they are ignoring each other as they walk beside each other. They mumble something on occasion, something about a dress or some kind of pottery but it's always a quick exchange and then they go back to silence. I don't know if they truly love each other or not but they're definitely not loving.