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I never knew the world could be so damned cold.

Back there, where I’m from, the stone walls chilled bones, the broken windows let rain puddle, and the uneven floor tripped feet and invited stubbed toes. But at least those walls provided protection from biting winds, pelting sleet, and piles of snow and ice.

Out here, though, I’m exposed. The wind whips through the holes in my clothing. The icy snow slips under my shirt and slides down my back. The sleet stings my face.

But I’m free.

A fair trade as far as I’m concerned.

My numb ears pick up the sound of car tires hissing through the snow. I turn and squint against the storm. A glow of headlights grows from beyond the curve in the mountains. A car is coming down the desolate highway.

I curse under my breath. I’ve got to keep my mind from wandering off. In my inattention, I almost violated his first rule:

Never let them see you.

A rush of adrenaline courses through my exhausted body, providing the boost of energy I need to scramble over the guardrail. I wriggle into a crevice and deep into the shadows between the icy boulders lining the edge of the highway.

The car comes into view. Heavy snowflakes glitter in the beams of light arcing over my head. I cower until the car sloshes past, praying the driver is unaware that I’m hunkering just feet away. The whine of the engine drops and fades into the distance.

I smile despite the frigid weather. For the first time in my sheltered life, Doppler effect is more than words I read in a dictionary.

Doppler effect—the change in the frequency of sound waves as an object moves closer or further from a listener.

It’s real, not some concept I’ve only read about. The approaching roar of a car. The swoosh of its pass. The drop in frequency. The dwindling drone as it drives into the distance.

I never knew the world could be so magical.

In our isolation, we spent hours quizzing each other from the dictionary, one of the few books other than the little kids’ picture books we had hidden away. We could only read the tongue twisters of Dr. Seuss and look at the stunning images of Where the Wild Things Are so many times before we memorized them. New books arrived infrequently. Not every kid came to us with a backpack.

The dictionary, which we’d found hidden in a blue satchel with pens, notebooks, and a ruler, enlarged our little world, revealing something new every time we opened it. We struggled to pronounce words correctly and erupted in muffled laughter at our mangled attempts. Each unraveled definition compelled us to look up more words. We had little practical experience to understand anything we learned, but the word games helped us pass the time, which felt interminable.

Interminable—having or seeming to have no end.

Unlike the Doppler effect, we experienced interminable. Day after day after day, we wondered when the end would come.

From my perch behind the protective rocks, I watch the taillights dwindle into the fog. The fear of being spotted subsides. My heart slows its pounding inside my thin chest. I’m grateful for an unexpected bonus—my hiding place shelters me from the fierce winds. I sit in relative comfort and watch the ruts created by the car turn white as the falling snow fills the void.

I cup my hands and blow warmth across my fingers, silently begging the feeling to come back. A shrill pain lights them up as the numbness fades, stabbing to the bone as I wriggle my digits to get the blood flowing. Though they don’t feel anything close to normal, I take it as a sign to resume my march down the road.

I clamber back onto the pavement. The wind beats my back and blows ice crystals from my shaggy hair. I wrap my arms around my thin shirt, shivering against the air rippling through the holes of my jeans and stinging the bare skin below. I tighten the rope threaded through the belt loops, cinching the pants to my waist. Hunched against the weather, I force my burlap-wrapped feet to shuffle through the snow and into the blackness that once again envelops the canyon and hides my presence.

I haven’t been as lucky hiding all night. My mind wanders down tangents and I drop my guard. A few hours ago, a guy in a dress shirt and loosened tie spotted me and slowed his car. He gawked at me, his eyes popped wide in surprise as I disappeared into the shadows off the side of the road.

Later, a trucker stopped his giant rig, a vehicle so large I had never imagined such a thing even existed. At first, I was startled by the rumbling engine and the hiss of the air brakes, a dragon exhaling its threat. The driver pushed open his door and climbed down the ladder of his cab as I scrambled into the brush. He stood in front of his growling beast and yelled into the wind for me to come to him. I stayed low, hidden away as he paced, shining a flashlight in hopes of spotting me. He meant no harm, he claimed. He said he wouldn’t hurt me and only wanted to get me somewhere safe and warm, but I knew he was a threat. All strangers are.

I remained tucked away, shivering but silent, until he finally surrendered his search with a shrug. With a last look over his shoulder, he climbed back into his warm cab. The gears ground, and he drove away, leaving a cloud of diesel exhaust.

Perhaps they wondered why I didn’t accept their offers of help.

The answer is simple. The first rule:

Never let them see you.

I wonder how many more times I’ll have the energy to pull myself back out of the shadows and onto this road. Another car will inevitably pass my hiding spot and, from sheer exhaustion, I’ll resign myself to my fate and refuse to move again. I’ll lower my head onto a granite pillow, the desire to close my eyes and rest outweighing the pull of moving farther down the road. I’ll drift into an eternal sleep, my heart slowing until it surrenders and ceases beating. My life will end as I have lived it, hidden from the world.

Even nature will conspire against me then, as it is doing now. He taught us that bodies needed to be buried deep to keep the animals from ravaging them. If I die out here with no one to tend to my remains and hide them out of reach of nature’s creatures, then the coyotes will emerge from the canyon, sniff my lifeless body, and drag it away. No one will ever find me. It’ll be a fitting end to my invisible life.

My foot hits a patch of ice and I tumble to the ground. The pain rattling my body saves me, breaking my wandering mind from its morbid reflections and forcing me back to cold reality. Horrified by my thoughts, I push myself to my feet, brush the snow off my body, and carry on. As bad as the odds are against me, I refuse to quit.

In all these years, I never have. I’ve watched others surrender and fade, their hope gone as their lives slip from their grasp, but something inside me kept pushing to live just one more damned day.

Not because I had anything to live for. There was no future back there. I just didn’t want to die in that dank, dark place.

I won. I didn’t die there. I made it out into the larger world—a much colder and snowier world than I expected, but I’m in it. And that’s a good thing. But now I need a new goal.

I pause and look around the dark canyon. A river runs loudly somewhere far below. Forested walls rise high on either side. The stars are obliterated by thick cloud cover and falling snow.

I’m tired of living in darkness, so I set myself a new goal—to see a sunrise. I’ve never seen one, but I know what others have told me. The brilliant pink and red hues shimmering against the dark blue sky. The magical light peeking over the horizon and extinguishing the stars one by one. The warmth of the sun on their skin. That warmth would feel great right now.

So that’s it. I want to experience a sunrise before I die.

Energized with a new goal in mind, I map the process in my mind. Step one—live through the night. It won’t be easy, but nothing ever has been.

I look to the east. At least, I think it’s east. This road has so many twists and turns as it follows the canyon carved out by the ancient river that I don’t know which way I’m facing. When I walked up to this big highway on the two-lane road from deep in the mountains, the red-and-blue signs had said east to the right and west to the left.

I’d taken the access ramp to the right—not because I’d thought of sunrises yet, but because it was closer than crossing under the bridge to turn left. Maybe it was fate that I’d turned in the direction of a sunrise. But a quick glance tells me the sky in front of me is still dark. There’s no hopeful, faint glow teasing a brighter day ahead.

I have no choice but to keep moving—to keep living—at least through the night if I want to see a sunrise. Then I can die happy.

Or maybe I’ll set a new goal and try to live another day.

I lower my head, lean against the wind, and trudge through the snow, hoping to survive until the sky in front of me brightens.

I never knew the world could be so damned cold.