LL The One Reliable Thing

[The One Reliable Thing]

LL

I walked down the hall, the empty hall. I could hear the chatter of kids behind the closed classroom doors. “Indigo St Marie please return to class,” my name blasted through the loudspeakers, letting everyone know that I wasn’t in class; not that they would care. Nobody cared; you’d think I’d be used to it by now. But I’m not…So I start to run, run out of being ignored, out of carelessness, out of where I used to belong. When I reached the bus stop, I’m out of breath. I quit track once she was gone, I quit a lot of things once she was gone. When the bus comes pulling up I hop on, the driver looks at me expectantly, I dig in my pocket and hand him my bus pass. He gives it back without a word, as usual. The bus is crowded for midday so I stand by the door, my hand on the pole, the vibrations of the bus running up my arm. “Buses, cars, trucks, planes, trains; no matter which one you take, it will take you somewhere. Whether you’re running away from something or towards something they move you physically and emotionally.” When she said this, we had been sitting on a bench waiting for the city bus. It had been raining like crazy, pouring down and not stopping. She was like that, with bursts of inspiration just out of nowhere. Always saying the weirdest things, always knowing what to say. That was my second favorite memory of her, and this was my first. We were 14, her brother had just gotten his license and decided to take us on a road trip. We had stopped at this little old cemetery where me and her began to walk around, after a while we found this one headstone that said, ‘Maryjane Honer Grezenski 1914-1929’ and underneath that ‘To be happy is one

impossible task.’ We both sat there, staring at it when she said, “Do you know what the only reliable thing on this planet is? It’s death. No matter what, we are all gonna die whether it’s one person or the human race as a whole; we will die,” She didn’t notice when I turned to look at her. She was the sun in my world and I was the moon. She was shining bright and I was just watching, like the moon looking at the blinking lights in all those houses. I didn’t know where I was going but I did know one thing: I wasn’t running towards, I was running from. Because maybe she took her own life, but she won’t take mine. By the time the bus had stopped for the third time it was almost empty, I walked over to one of the empty seats in the middle and plopped down, exhausted. But one thing’s for sure: today is my eighteenth birthday, and I am free to leave. To leave everyone, everything, and everywhere I used to belong.