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"No welcome home, for your older sister?"
"You're only older by six seconds, Dove."
Pain. It shot through my heart, there was no nickname, there was no Sissy or even little dove, I signed, before kicking the dirt with my heels...
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Twelve years old. At the small age of a young girl, you get asked a question. "What would you like to be when your older?"
It was a question that Dove never understood. She raised her eyebrow at her mother and continued to eat her morning breakfast. She wasn't big on questions and answers, but she was big on dreams. She was big on her imagination, on what life she wanted and what life could look like - if she let it. But the age of twelve, she wasn't sure on an answer and she would usually just reply with, "I don't know - a doctor maybe?".
Her mother would usually give her a eye roll and then they would move about their day like normal.
But when Dove is now sixteen years of age, she would reply with an answer that you wouldn't normally hear, she would give an answer that shocked her highschool teacher in class.
"To live."
Dove became the girl who would want to live in the moment, live in the present and not the past nor the future. She wanted to enjoy the small things, the fact she could smell the bagels of an morning in the middle of her big city, or the fact that she would watch the people below move around like small ants and not have a care in the world about anyone or anything.
Daydreaming lead into Dove's biggest fantasy.
Love.
The love from someone, something or a feeling. The love that she would feel when she would hug her brother before leaving him at the end of summers. The love she would feel when she would be living two different worlds, surfing in the summer and school in the fall. The type of love she would read about in books, when the boy would fall for the quite girl, or the love in movies when he climbs up the side of the house in the rain to tell her that he loves her.
It took one moment, on shot - to ruin the day dreaming imagination of Dove Routledge.
It was a sound that she can't forget, it runs through her ears like a titled wave. Crashing her, consuming her mind. It took a few moments before she was out the house, running down the stairs, black duffle bag around her shoulder, with all her necessary items that she had packed weeks in advance of leaving in such a fright and hurry. She knew that this time would come, she knew from the strange men turning up to her door, looking for her mother for the past few weeks, she knew what she had to do - when the shot rang through her ears, she ran.
