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In his mind – he was running. He was running away from the broken police lights, the deafening thickness of the sirens in his ears, his feet were just barely tapping the slick black pavement of the ground, but he was running. He could almost feel the great expanse of his lungs, the slight sweet burn at the way his organs would be choked off from every breath, the way his cheeks would feel against the cold air on this night – smooth and shivery and like a shard of glass through the sky. He doesn’t have a destination in his mind, not tonight, not ever again, he’s running, running, running.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, you see, not tonight. He had been exhausted, the weight of the world seemingly pressurized into the backs of his shoulders, right underneath the stretch of his neck and where he kept his failures. His muscles had been aching for days, the tendons and veins clogged up with the broken remnants of dreams he had as a boy. He was incredibly young, and blaringly innocent, and he had not yet faced the bright expanse of the world. The most fascinating thing about him was the way his hair smelled like grass just recently after it was cut.

He had gotten into the car that day, had leaned his head back against the seat. His car had always smelled old, with a burnt crisp edge of something faintly unpleasant. He had tried over and over again to mask the scent, to compel his mind into believing that his car truly smelled like overpriced lavender or some Hawaiian scent that never truly existed. All that he was left with was bitter undertones and a whole lot of cheap smells. Sometimes he wondered if that’s what he was doing with his life – masking a truth that he could never truly accept. He had run his hands over the smooth cracked leather of his steering wheel – old, and warm, and just like his father had left it when he had gifted it he trekked off to college.

“You’ll do great, my son!” He can hear it echoing faintly in his ears, right next to the smothered noises that are dimly muted in the back of his head. His father’s voice was always a bit smooth, a bit rough, the perfect kind of mixture when you don’t know what you need. He wonders, just a small thought in the back of his unfocused mind, what his father will sound like when he hears of this. His face is starting to ache, his jaw awfully close to the gravel that’s lining the road beneath him.

It wasn’t his fault.

He was driving, turning the corner, wondering how his life would end up – would he forever be young and stifled in an office that he hated, in a life that he no longer wanted? Would it get better? Did he have hope, or did his life end the day he had decided the way it would go? The car had turned, the truck had flown, and now he was splayed on the ground.

His bones were a lot stiff, almost like the joints in his body had turned into the thick tar that creates the roads and swirls like molten depths of blackness. His cheek was beginning to ache with the presence of little rocks jamming into his skin, but the pain has been washed away in a pool of numbness – he can feel the volume, the thickness of the rocks, but all they are is a remnant of something he will be parting soon. He thinks he can distinctly feel wetness in his blue dress shirt, it’s quite a thin material anyway, and it’s sticking to his skin very uncomfortably and making his body feel like he had jumped into a cool summer lake, and was expected to walk around in the clothes he had swam in.

In his mind though, he was finally running. Away and far and to new and great places. He was feeling the burn in his mouth and the dizziness in his head set in a soft, fuzzy way. It was a welcoming sort of reprieve, an vigorous ending to a indolent life. His speed picks up in his head, so fast, so dizzying, that his eyes have to be squeezed shut so that he can keep a focus on his path – a narrow path, one that reminds him of going home, on the cracked beige sidewalk sitting outside his parents’ house. Except now he wasn’t bleeding, he wasn’t a child, nor was he the man who grew up in the monotonous setting he had called his beginnings- no, he was just a boy, going for a run, with his years ahead of him and a smile on his face.

He was heading towards a white light.