Run Girl, Run,
The rain came down in sheets, the kind that devours the earth, obliterating everything in its path until the last vestiges of heat are nothing more than ghosts. At first, the air hung thick and damp, a suffocating cloak that stuck to my skin, even though the temperature had plummeted. But tonight—it was different. Tonight felt like those long-dead autumns of my childhood, when the world was cool, damp, and alive with something long buried. I can still see it, the way I used to press my face against the glass in my old bedroom, watching the wind whip through the trees lining the street. The streetlights cast their soft, yellow glow, and the trees—those ancient, towering sentinels—swayed like they knew some secret. They seemed invincible back then.
And tonight, for the first time in what feels like forever, the sadness didn’t come crawling out of the dark to claim me. Loneliness didn’t slip its cold hands around my ribs, squeezing until the air fled from my lungs. Instead, something else stirred, something I thought I’d buried deep enough that it would never rise again. My soul, maybe—the part of me that had been dormant, slumbering in the ashes—finally blinked awake.
A year ago, though, it was all different. A year ago, everything fell apart. The ground beneath my feet crumbled, and I bolted. I ran like a wounded animal, instinct driving me to flee a life that had become unbearable. After heartbreaks that left me gutted, hollowed out like some discarded shell, what was left of me climbed into the car in the dead of night and just kept driving. West. There was no destination, no plan. I wasn’t looking for anything; I just wanted to leave behind the madness that had burned itself into my bones, the wildfire that threatened to consume me whole if I stayed still long enough.
But once you start running, you learn that stopping is the real fear. Stopping means facing the wreckage, looking in the mirror and seeing the ruins of what you once were. I knew—God, I knew—that if I slowed down, I’d hate what I saw. I would look into those fractured, empty eyes and want to destroy whatever was left. That tiny, desperate part of me—the part still clinging to survival—knew the truth: stopping would mean annihilation. So, I ran, hoping that somewhere along the endless stretch of highway, I could outrun the wreckage of my life.
But the cruel truth about running from your demons is that you can never outrun yourself. No matter how far you go, no matter how many miles of desolation you put between you and the pain, you’re always there, shadowing your every move. And eventually, I stopped. The caffeine stopped working, the adrenaline wore off, and I was left emptied out, a shell. I pulled off the highway just outside Kansas, the road stretching endlessly behind me, a testament to all the chaos I was so desperate to leave behind. I found a motel—a sad, sagging place where time felt frozen, where everything smelled like stale cigarettes and broken promises.
Inside, the room was as hollow as I was. Cold concrete walls, chipped and forgotten, a bed that sagged under the weight of years of neglect. The only light came from the flickering neon VACANCY sign outside, casting a sickly glow that pulsed like a dying heartbeat through the window.
I sat on the edge of that bed, the silence so thick it was deafening, and I did the only thing I could think to do. I took a handful of pills. It felt like the only way to drown out the chaos in my mind, the relentless, screaming madness that clung to me, no matter how fast I ran. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could swallow it all down and escape.
