Crowbuds And Daffodils (h.s)

Prologue

Ella Wenters

Everyone told me leaving would be the hardest part, but they were wrong.

Leaving felt like flying. Leaving the past behind me, forever locked behind a door I lost the key to, it felt like everything everyone in my small, good for nothing town convinced me it wouldn't be.

Leaving was easy. The fear of the chase, the constant cat and mouse game, the paranoia that they will find me in some gas station somewhere and drag me right back to the hell I crawled from — that is a battle I fight every single day.

Even when browsing in a podunk town, I'm, even still, filled with paranoia. Plucking a bag of pistachios from a shelf in an old grocery store,  circling aisles with the elderly pedestrians all hobbling along at their torturously slow pace, I find myself looking over my shoulder. I can never be too careful, too self aware, too hopeful that he just let me go without a bigger fight.

Even now, after everything has changed and the dark doesn't seem so endless, the presence of my foster father sits on my chest like algae would a boat. It clings to me. I've scraped sole layers little bit by little bit, but I fear I'll never truly be clean.

He spent the greater part of his life manipulating, lying, and sneaking around to get what he wanted. He worked hard and I know it. I have no doubt he's only one step behind me.

My foster father doesn't and has never had it in him to let the past remain just that -- the past. Maybe that's why he became a pastor, to stand in front of a crowd each Sunday preaching about the past and trying to make it the present. Repetitive. Pointless. Naive.

They can't hurt you anymore. They will never hurt you again. This is your chance, now take it.

If there is anything I've learned in the short time I've been on the run it's that even if the 'normal' is less than satisfactory, it is oftentimes less scary than the change.

But change is necessary, a way out, sometimes the only way. You have to embrace the unknown, at least that's what I've learned in every book I've ever read. You have to hold your arms wide open and let it fill you up, move you forward.

Being stuck in motion never get's you anywhere. Especially nowhere good.

I can't help but understand the looks people give to misfits like me: drifters, travelers, creatures of happenstance, self-indulgent on the change they fear. Looking for purpose. There one minute and gone the next. I can see the pity, disappointment and distaste that flashes in their eyes, even when they desperately try to hide it behind a polite smile, wave, or attempt at small talk.

They won't ever understand how it feels to be so utterly and completely misplaced and unheard. Alone.

I know at deep down what people really want is something to gossip about. That's really all life is for small town folk. Who said what, where they said it, who they said it to. What someone has done, who they did it with, where they did it. It's a grueling, vicious cycle.

I've learned the basics of on-the-road living. It's not a hard task trying to avoid making the same mistakes when nearly everything is life or death, feast or famine. I've watched other's like me, the ones that have it worse, the ones that have clearly been living on the road longer — in tents under bridges, under overhangs on buildings, tucked into the woods.

I use their examples and mistakes as my own map for success. My map for survival, really. What to do, and what not to do.

Usually, any question I ask is answered with no hesitation. Truth is that people like me, the people who don't know what home really looks like or feels like, the ones constantly chasing whatever it is we are searching for — they get it. I take their advice like trinkets worth stashing away. I never know when I might need them.