Tilly had always liked to run away.
The first time, she was nine and had snuck out her window to the empty lot across from their house. She hid in the tall grass and giggled to herself. How delicious. No one could see her.
They weren’t even looking for her.
The sun beat down on the back of her head.
They’d look soon.
They didn’t, and Tilly instead, hot and bored, with her legs cramping, snuck back in through her bedroom window, and no one had ever even known she’d run away.
It didn’t deter her, though. She spent entire afternoons up trees, hiding. Watching. She liked to disappear from view and lie around thinking what else was out there in the world. There would be so much, and when would she even be able to see it all? Time passed in flashes, in lapses. Delicious, impatient lead-up-to moments that were over in a snap, leaving only a fading memory that trickled away and became nothing but a soft impression, fuzzy around the edges.
The moment in the tall grass that reached up above her head, brushing the blue sky above, left an itch in her toes. Because what else could you do but chase the next moment, one which could hide the reality that the last had passed and everything had moved on?
The urge to run eventually settled down. It sank deep, sometimes unable to be seen at all.
Until it returned as a teenager: aching and angry, shame a knot in her stomach and a secret roiling within her. She started running and never wanted to stop.
Even now, thirty-two and a heart aching with something that wasn’t pain, and her lips ghosting with an almost, she was still running. Today’s pause was on a beach instead of within tall grass or a tree, but she was still running.
Seawater ran over her feet, achingly cold: the sting tracking up her feet, her legs, prickling up her spine. Orange and red and yellow splashed over the sky, deep and dark at the line where the ocean was swallowing the sun. As if a chasm had opened up and was drinking it down.
Like a secret she let bury itself.
She wanted to be brave. She wanted to be like Evie, her best friend—her everything, really—sure and settled; or like Sean, the brother she’d never had. But instead, she kept running.
She sucked in a breath and tried to breathe in that sunset, filling herself with the colours. It was like ice as it hit her lungs. She straightened her spine.
For once, she would be brave.
Maybe try to stop running. Share a secret.
Just the one.