"What would Mom and Dad do if they knew what I was doing?" was my first thought as I pressed my left foot into the darkness, just past the reach of the porch light. I was ready.

I listened to the hum of the cars on the highway just a mile or two outside of my neighborhood. How lucky and free they were, able to drive at whatever time of day they desired. It was 4 am, for God's sake. I was expected to be home by 9 o'clock every evening, and there were no exceptions. Ever.
So, eventually, I made the decision that one day I just wouldn't come home.

I had been fully aware for weeks that the night prior to today would be the last night of my first life. Tonight, in the slightly chilly June air, that step into the uncertain darkness was the beginning of an entirely different reality.

I was going to be free.
"Nothing is going to stop me today," my mind cried over and over. I knew I would not be able to pause for breath for a long time, so I halted at the edge of my front yard to retrieve a water bottle from my backpack. As my hand touched the smooth surface of the bottle, I abruptly realized how nervous I was. My hands were not just shaking but trembling, and I realized that my entire body was not just unsteady; it quivered uncontrollably with each slight movement of my hand, of my head. Everything was moving, even though I was stopped.

I quickly took a swig of water, and then I returned the bottle to my light grey bag. I struggled to fit the bottle back into my pack, filled to the brim with more water bottles, food, clothes, and other necessities, as well as a can of red spray paint. After I finally placed the bottle back into the protection of the bag's cotton fabric, I anxiously felt around the inside pocket for my thin pink wallet, made of some kind of rubber. I'd been withdrawing about fifty dollars per week for just over four months, subtly preparing for this trip. Fifty dollars per week was a believable weekly budget for an eighteen-year-old who'd had a summer receptionist job at a dentist's office. Secretly, I stashed each penny I withdrew into my little pink wallet, which I hid in the very back of my closet, in the toe of an old and wrinkly cowboy boot that comprised one half of a set. I used to wear these boots around the house each day when I was a child. Today, I became some kind of adult. At least, I hoped so.

Eight hundred and thirty-six dollars and fourteen cents withdrawn over a period of seventeen weeks. Eight hundred and thirty six dollars and fourteen cents. It was just enough to get me by bus to Boothbay Harbor, Maine and support my food and water needs as well, for a little while at least. I hoped to find a job once I arrived in this new little village, but if it came down to it, I was willing to sleep on public park benches at night and play my guitar on the street for money during the day. At least I'd be free to go wherever the eastern air decided to scatter me.

It felt odd being outside of my house without a phone in my pocket. I had no way of accessing the inner thoughts and ridiculous anecdotes that crawled through the minds of my friends. A feeling of nostalgia briefly suffocated my rigid breathing; I knew I would be dead to them when morning came. I was never coming back. Would I miss my friends? Of course I would. I wouldn't even be alive if it weren't for some of them, but it came to the point when neither myself nor my friends could stand to carry my burdens anymore. It becomes exhausting after a little while, so while my friends have slowly eased themselves out from under the burdens that I have shared with them, I've simply dropped them and run. What is life if the only thing you have to look forward to each day is going to sleep in a frugal attempt to escape the weight on your back? My worries even haunted my dreams.

I would be running from some kind of dark and foreboding energy behind me, and my legs would suddenly become much too heavy to move any faster than a snail's pace. I'd stand there in pure terror and anticipation as I felt the menacing darkness drifting closer behind me. And just as I admitted to myself that all hope was lost, the screen behind my eyelids would suddenly cut off, like the end of a movie scene. And then, darkness. I never have found out what really happens at the end of that hell of a dream, even though it has run through my dormant consciousness over the course of countless nights.

After having that dream so many damn times, I finally realized what I believe I was supposed to figure out long ago: my dream was my reality. Each day I woke up at 6:55am to get ready for school, and every day it was with a feeling of decay in my stomach and a tinge of dread surrounding each of my thoughts. I then spent months, no, years trying to somehow quietly alter the life I was suffering into one of contentment. All attempts failed.

That was when I decided to run, before my stubborn legs began to turn to concrete. The time had come for me to abandon this part of myself that burned my insides so badly and made my mouth taste like blood. Each day I walked into my house, the arch above the front door seemed to have the words "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," etched somewhere beneath the perfect white paint that spread across my porch.
In Dante's Inferno, these same words are scraped over the gates of hell.

The walk to the bus stop would cost me just short of an hour; it was a few miles outside of my neighborhood. As I neared the giant evergreen tree that stood guard at the corner of my street, I paused. I took a deep breath in, and smiled softly as the scent of the big tree ran through my nose. I stared at that tree for a while. It had been there as long as I could remember. A single aspect in my life that had not changed completely.

I walked on. A few minutes past the end of the street that was never really mine, I realized the only sounds that broke the thick silence that coated the brisk night air were the cars flying by on the highway I was slowly approaching and the soles of my combat boots bumping the sidewalk pavement. I had grown very accustomed to silence, which is why I did not immediately pay any mind to the stillness of my surroundings. My parents never talked to me. It was as if I did not reside in the same realm that they did. My parents did not talk to each other, either; in fact, they hated each other. If I spent too much time around my parents, I became suffocated by the silence. Why didn't they talk to me? What was wrong with me? I'd tried talking to them about this before, but my mother would just walk away from me, and talking about anything serious with my father generally made him dangerously angry. As a result of my odd family situation, I spent most of my time in my room, listening to music or to the wild hush of the wind that floated through my open window.

Now the air around me was fresh and encompassing, covering my entire body with the smell of sweet grass on a spring evening. I was surrounded by freedom and effortless beauty. Finally, I was following the lessons of the branches of the trees, moving each and any way that I desired.

I finally reached the bus stop at around 4:55am. The bus would be there in ten minutes. I had completed the first and most nerve-wrecking leg of my uncertain journey. I smiled.

A scuffle behind me. I jerked my head around, thinking in my paranoid state that one of my parents would appear out of the darkness between the streetlights. Would they even really look for me at all when they found out I was gone, though? Hopefully yet painfully, probably not. A single figure emerged. It was not either of my parents, that was certain.

The figure moved uncoordinatedly toward the bus stop, favoring the right side of its body. I sat frozen in my chair, unsure of how to handle such an unclear situation. I squinted at what I could then tell was a human of some kind, unable to make out its features without my glasses on. It was, simply, a dark figure. I remember that I was terrified, unable to move as I attempted to push myself from the dirty bus stop bench.  And then, darkness.

I awoke with a gasp and found myself at the same bus stop in the same position as before. I sat up immediately and threw my head from side to side, looking for the danger that I anticipated. Nothing was there. I let out a shaky sigh. A dream. My watch read 5:03am. I had only been asleep for eight minutes. I could hear the hum and cough of a large engine approaching. The bus was coming. My ticket to freedom was just a few hundred yards away.

I stood up with my backpack slung over my back, my guitar laid across my feet, and I looked into the radiant sky before me, teeming with deep oranges and shiny yellows, the trees of the forest preserve across the street silhouetted against this array of color. My hair floated in the soft wind that caressed my face. In that moment, I was just a part of the horizon, silhouetted with the trees into a scheme of deep black.

The bus approached, and I boarded. I slunk all the way to the back of the vehicle, far behind a few tired-looking men and women who zoned out in front. I fixed my eyes out the window next to me, and I watched the landscape begin to rush as the bus accelerated once more. Adrenaline swam through my veins. I lifted one of my hands in front of my face. It was as affected by the adrenaline as a stray leaf was by the wind. My entire body could not remain still. It seemed to shake with each tiny misplaced section of gravel that the bus passed over. At this point, my own body was out of my control. As hard as I tried to keep my body still, I could not do anything to truly change its state. It remained unstable.

After several hours and what felt like a few million stops, we passed a tiny sign to the right of the bus that read "Welcome to Boothbay." I was here. I was actually, finally here. My own life ended as another began to materialize around me. My stomach flipped with nervous excitement. Could I really do this? Was this actually happening? I let out a sigh of great hope and relief at the fact that I had made it to my new life, and a lifetime of burdens fell from my scrawny shoulders. I watched the bus stop in the distance slowly approach. This bus stop had been in my dreams for what felt like decades. It was just as I had imagined it, except the paint was a deep black on the outsides of the small shelter, and the bench underneath was covered in rust. Darker than I had imagined, but still beautiful. This place would be my new reality.

I exited the bus and began my trek around Boothbay, trying to figure out the best places to sleep and the busiest areas to play my guitar, in an effort to make at least a little money. I found a public park with a few benches scattered near the town's little harbor. I decided that I'd claim a bench just a few yards from the edge of land so that I could fall asleep to the sounds of rushing waves. After deciding on my spot to sleep, I wandered around the quaint town. I found a few busy storefronts by which I could set myself and my guitar. I spent the remainder of the day playing music.

I made nineteen dollars. By the time I moved from my spot in front of the store, it was almost nine o'clock at night. I stopped in a coffee shop and bought a cheese sandwich and some tea. I took my food to my park bench of choice, looking out over the sullen harbor covered in twilight. The fire in the sky was turning ashy. How did I get here?, I wondered. I could still feel the adrenaline pulsing through my veins, and I lifted up my hand to witness an intense trembling that moved from my fingertips all the way to my elbow. Being here, in this new place in an unfamiliar life, I felt lost. But I also felt free.

As I sat there alone, pondering the events that led me to this stage in my life, I felt a hot breath on my neck. I knew immediately what was behind me. I could not turn my head to watch the dark figure as it slid its deformed hand over my left shoulder. I had the inexplicable feeling that I was going to be taken. I put the entire mass of my body into fighting to get up from that bench and run, but my right leg only moved up about a tenth of an inch and then froze yet again, like thick, melded wire. In that moment, I knew that I was powerless to fight the darkness that poured itself around me. I knew what was going to happen: I was going to die. And then, darkness.

I awoke with a start and an inhaled scream.
I heard a branch crack behind me. Still unable to pinpoint the line between dream and reality, I turned slowly around, confused and terrified.

Figures. Not black and not indecipherable. I counted five young-looking humans as they emerged from the cover of the shadowy collage of trees behind my bench. Four boys and a single girl. A tiny dot of color glowed orange near the mouth of one of the boys. A cigarette. My eyes widened as the group began moving toward me. Were they just a group of kids hanging out, or were they a clan of criminals?

"Wait, what the hell was that? No one ever comes here at night," asked the tall, thin boy with the cigarette pressed between his lips. Suddenly all heads turned toward me, following the motion of Cigarette Boy's boney finger in my direction. They all stared at my shadowed figure, and I stared back at them.

Silence.

It was the girl who spoke first. “Uh, hello?”

I bit my lip as I mumbled the word “hi”.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Before I began exhaling a response, a knife flashed in the moonlight as a large boy with a thick beard moved toward me. I stood up quickly, backing away with my hands cautiously in front of me.

“I’m- I’m not from here,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know this place is yours.”

“This place is no one’s,” said the girl, moving her hands over her head to gently capture a firefly, “Put your knife away, Sully. You don’t even know how to use the thing, darling.” This comment was followed by a soft and staccato giggle. I stared at the girl in awe, wondering what kind of picture was on the canvas in her head. Definitely a weird one.

The boy whose name apparently was Sully snatched my backpack from the bench and unzipped it, looking for money, I assumed. In my head, I said my goodbyes to the eight hundred and thirty-six dollars and fourteen cents sitting in the inner pocket of my bag. Sully unzipped my bag and looked inside. His eyebrows raised ever so slightly, and an upward curve appeared on the left side of his mouth. He reached into the backpack, and he came out with the can of red spray paint I planned to use to tag a bridge or concrete wall in each new city that I experienced.

Sully put down my bag, now only holding the knife and the can – one item in each hand. Then, he closed the knife and returned it to the pocket of his shorts, leaving only the can in his grasp.

“You tag?” he asked.

Slowly, I smiled.

Sully looked over at his four friends, standing quietly behind him. Cigarette Boy dropped the butt of his cigarette into the dirt at his feet, stomping on it. All five of them looked at each other as if they were having an in-depth conversation, yet no words escaped from their mouths. They all exchanged glances and subtle nods, and then, all at once, their eyes fixed upon me.

“Come with us,” said the girl.

I explained to them my story as we walked from the beach to a hilly area. We walked for a long time until we suddenly came to a fence. One of the boys, not Sully or Cigarette Boy, walked directly into the fence, and as he contacted it, it moved with him. A hole.

We walked over a hill, teeming with wild grass that tickled my knees. At the top of the hill, I looked down to see rusted train tracks, overgrown with dandelions and weeds. In the distance, I spotted a bridge. We walked silently toward the bridge. As we approached in the darkness, I caught glimpses of blues, yellows, and purples, blacks, whites, and oranges. The bridge was a rainbow array of vandalism. Graffiti. It was beautiful.

“Did you do all this?” I asked breathlessly.

“No, a lot of the bridge had already been covered when we first found it, but we filled the remaining spots with our own art,” said Cigarette Boy.

Under the bridge, we climbed a wall of about five feet and sat down, then rotating our bodies 180 degrees and throwing our legs over the side opposite to the one from which we had come. I looked down. There was an array of blankets, books, and even a guitar to match my own. It seemed that these people were fellow wanderers who were a bit further along in their journey than I was. They had made a place for themselves here.

We made ourselves comfortable on the blankets. Everyone laid down except for me, feeling slightly out of place as a guest in this graffiti-stained world. I sat up for a long time, listening to the chatter of these new companions. Sully was telling a story about a time when he’d almost been arrested for “something like public drunkenness or whatever.” That was when I saw it. A figure walking down the tracks, dark and indecipherable. Its invisible eyes seemed to fix right on me. I tried opening my mouth to warn the group about the figure, but no sound came out. I barely croaked. I couldn’t breathe. All of my effort went into screaming at my companions to warn them of the doom that was coming upon me. The darkness was coming toward all of us, yes. But it was not there for them. The presence of Sully and the girl and Cigarette Boy and the other two guys was irrelevant to this hunched over creature. I watched it moving closer, unable to move and unable to fight. It turned from a blurry figure against the slowly lightening horizon to a full-blown figure of about six feet tall just a few yards before me. At this point, not even my eyes could move from the grip of this creature’s madness.

I knew what was going to happen.

As the creature made its way up the wall swinging its stumbling stumps over the concrete barrier, I watched as a dark growth came into view, growing out of the main darkness. It looked like a knife. As the darkness crawled past my oblivious friends, it finally came over me. After all this time, I was finally going to witness the end of this nightmare.

Slowly, the darkness drove its blade into my chest as I sat itching to scream and squirm.

I awoke to a pounding in my ears, a scream in my mouth, and a pain in my chest. I tried to calm myself, attempting to bring myself back to the safety of reality. I opened my eyes to a graffiti-covered ceiling. My chest throbbed. I looked down to see a pool of blood surrounding my sprawled-out body. Then, I felt nothing. The sun was rising in the early summer morning, and I began to close my eyes to the graffiti-covered ceiling. It was beautiful.

And then, darkness.