Running Away

By Peter Bowden


 

He packed like a thief in his own room, quiet and fast, the way anger teaches you to move. A shirt, a pair of socks, the flashlight with the weak yellow eye. His hands shook, not from fear but from the heat of words still ringing in his ears: Because we said so, You don’t understand yet. He didn’t slam the door. That would have meant asking to be stopped. Instead, he slipped out into the evening, the sky low and bruised, the neighborhood holding its breath as if it knew what he was trying to do.

The road felt different once he stood on it, longer than it had ever been on a bicycle. The houses leaned back into their porches, lights coming on one by one, small suns behind curtains. He walked until his anger thinned, until it began to tear like paper left too long in rain. The world did not open up the way he had imagined. It did not beckon or promise. It only waited. In that waiting, memories rose uninvited—the smell of toast in the morning, his father’s quiet cough behind the newspaper, his mother humming without knowing she was doing it. Love, he realized, was not loud. It did not argue. It stayed.

When he turned back, the house was exactly where it had always been, but it seemed to step forward to meet him. The porch light burned steady, a small, patient star. He sat on the steps for a long moment, listening to the night, then opened the door. No speeches came. His parents did not rush him with words. His mother’s hand found his shoulder. His father stood there, solid and imperfect and real. The boy let his bag fall to the floor. Anger, he learned, could make you leave, but love was what showed you the way back.

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