First Post

[moonwater2334.livejournal.com]

Hiya! I'm just a young writer looking for a little feedback on a short piece.

Everything became a blur, after a while.

Nothing had ever felt this good. A dusty road, a vast stretch of desert, the cool mountains in the distance, beckoning us closer, drawing us farther from where we should be. We can't bring ourselves to care, though. This has been calling to us. It's not where we should be, but it is where we're meant to be.

I caught sight of a calendar in the last small, lazy town we'd stumbled through. The other two followed my gaze, did nothing but smile, just a bit, and climb back into our car.

Turns we were due home a month ago. We have family and friends and school and work waiting for us there, but right now none of us can give a damn.

We have the windows open as wide as they go, pedal to the floor, smooth classics sliding through the speakers. The music is barely audible over their wild whoops and laughter. My heart is beating far too fast, far too hard, and I let my breathless sounds of joy join theirs.

A different sort of future stretches out before us.

*

We never did make it home.

*

We'd been wandering, as usual; a right turn here, a highway exit chosen at the last possible second. Aimless, as we usually were. The way we liked it.

Then the sign was there, an interruption in the green of vegetation.

Welcome to Florida, it said.

The words were jarring, bold black accusations of the responsibility we'd abandoned. I could feel Shadow shivering slightly, the smallest judder of her arm against mine. Time brushed his fingers over the back of her neck, comforting. Met my eyes over her shoulder. Turn around, they said.

I did.

We'd been far too close, then. Too close to a place we'd once called home.

It took a while for the uneasiness to fade, after that.

But we would never regret it.

*

We found ourselves in the sequoia forests one day. Giant, ageless trees that were here long before any of us were born, trees that will still be standing when we've been cold in the ground for hundreds of years.

They are tall, proud, defiant of even nature's attempts to pull them from where their roots have dug deep into the earth. This planet belongs to them.

Time plucked a sliver of bark from the ground. Deep, rich redbrown. Twined a strand of my colored hair around it; tucked it behind my ear.

They match, he said. Delighted.

The bark, my hair. Redbrown. The same.

*

A song crackled over the radio. Familiar, soothing. Shadow, Time, and I linked hands and danced in the shade.

The music ended, the station faded, and still we danced.

The clouds burst, and still we danced.

On and on and on.

*

It was a cool morning, the day we left. The sun just peeking above the horizon. Brightening light glistening on fresh dewy grass, the small creatures of the dark disappearing into damp hideaways.

Everything was still, most warm in their beds, safe in domesticity, in carefully planned lives.

The day before a door had closed; a part of our lives over and done, but a new road spread before us. One that had more to offer then the town.

I hadn't bothered with a note. What was there to say? I couldn't tell them where I was going, because I didn't know.

Nearby, an engine roared.