Jack is running. It’s started to rain, but he doesn’t want to stop. The air is starting to fog, and more than once he’s almost missed a pair of headlights. Everything is telling him to turn back, there’s nothing out there that’s going to change what happens when he finally has to go home, but the feeling is so good, he can’t tear himself from it.
He doesn’t know where he’s going, and he’s glad. He wants to be stuck in this in-between. Between beginnings and ends, between destinations, between now and then. Like riding in the backseat. No real responsibilities, the world is in flux. Trees and houses and rivers and clouds pass that you’ll only ever see once, everything is very singular and important and insignificant. When you get home, roads loop back in on themselves, and even when you drive for days there are only so many trees and so many houses to see, and sooner or later you dread them.
So, he keeps running. His lungs ache, and his legs are threatening to buckle but he doesn’t stop. He falls, once, twice, and on skinned knees he keeps running. The rain washes the blood away and soaks him through, and he can hear the sky crack, and he sees the headlights through sheets of fog. He’s never been here before, and he’ll never be here again, and time doesn’t seem to pass. It’s just steady, steady and soft. There is only now, there is only rain.
When he reaches a dead end, he stops, chest heaving and heart in his throat. He stops, and he feels the pain settle back onto his shoulders and between his ribs. The rain still pours, but it stings his skin now, it makes him weak.
He should go back, he knows he should. If he’s here too long, this place will become home too, and that’s the only place he doesn’t want to be.
So, he walks. Back and back and back down the road he thought was new. The rain stops, suddenly, like someone’s turned on the lights.