Follow the Animals

My feet pound on the pavement.
My head blurs with voices.
My eyes see nothing that passes.
Do you feel this way when someone that was your one and only, that you loved so, so much that no one could possibly love anybody more just vanishes off the face of the Earth? If that hasn't happened to you, consider yourself lucky that you are not a fourteen-year-old girl living in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with nowhere to go or no one to turn to for help. It's not like anybody would befriend a weird, average girl like me. I have no distant relatives. All of them died off just like parents and now this person. They just had to. With my luck, a tornado is going to hit my town and sweep me off my feet to who knows where. I stop all of a sudden from my running rage, grief growing inside of me like weeds. Weeds just grow and grow until someone comes along and cuts them down, but doesn't pull out the roots. So they grow back until someone with actual brains inside their heads comes and tears out the weeds and their roots. But no one in this entire universe can rip out this root of grief inside of me. I sit down on the sidewalk, people walking all around me, and pour my tears onto the street. All around me suddenly gets quiet and I smother myself into it, wrapping me into it like a baby in a blanket. I realize now that I didn't even get to say goodbye to this person. I wasn't even home when it happened. But she did leave me a note, which lead me to think this death was planned, but I couldn't possibly be sure. All the note said was, Follow the animals.