Escape

“Don’t wake Mom and Dad,” my sister whispers, tiptoeing downstairs and out the front door. She does not wait for me. I try to catch up, as my feet stumble along the pavement. There is no grass here to cushion their ceaseless pounding, but I do not care, I want to go too.

I want to follow, but I cannot keep up. She does not seem to notice me. She cannot hear me screaming her name. She cannot hear me telling my side of things. Maybe that is all I really want—to tell her my side of things.

I try to recollect my thoughts, but I am tired now. My heart thumps louder, and I start to feel a stinging sensation in my legs. I am running faster, faster, until I run out of breath and finally crumple in two, breathing so heavily that the world starts to blur.

But she is not tired. She can breathe perfectly fine, not at all like the way she would gasp between sobs on those long painful nights, when there was nothing I could do but hold her hair back or hug her and wonder how someone I loved so much could cry so hard and not be able to stop.

No, she is not tired. She is running, streetlights obscuring her figure to a simple silhouette trailing its way behind her, beyond me. No, she is not tired. The tired cannot run like that.