The Acceptance of Change

Chapter 23: Darwin.

I ran to my garage and grabbed my foster dad's bike that he lets me borrow every so often and I began to bike towards the park. It was the dead of night. I heard the clicking of the chain on the bike get faster and louder as I speed up. On my way there I had to bike on the road, due to the lack of a sidewalk at that point. The streetlights never gave a consistent lighting to the road, so there was an almost strobing light attacking me as I kept going. The streets were empty at this time of night, normally there's the occasional passing of a car, but I didn't hear as much of an owl's hoot.

About 20 minutes later, I arrived at the park. However, I was only at the entrance, I needed to get to more of the internal part of the park. The pond.

I biked there. Once I reached the end of the gravel path, and the beginning of the grass, I got off my bike and began to walk it towards the path. Once I reached the path, I hopped back on my bike.

splash

I booked it towards the pond. The path was a long hill down so I biked down the hill as fast as I could, when I reached the bottom of it almost instantly, I couldn't control the bike enough to stop it. Directly in front of me was a crossroads with a path to the left and a path to the right. I jumped off the bike and slammed myself in the ground.

"SHIT", I yelled. I think I just dislocated my shoulder. It took the brunt of the impact.

I then got up with my limp arm and began running to the pond. I look at the water and see the ripples of water that made almost a target for me due to the street lights illuminating it. I ran to the middle of the platform and jumped in with no hesitation.

The clothes I was wearing weighed me down, but I had no time to waste. I couldn't use one of my arms to swim so I tried my best with one of them and 2 of my legs. The deeper I went the darker it got. I couldn't see Sadie anywhere. Was I wrong? Was it maybe just a duck that jumped in the water? Or even a fish that jumped for no good reason? I was very deep at that point and couldn't hold my breath any longer. I tried to swim back up, but one arm wasn't gonna cut it. The pressure was making my ears feel an unbearable pain.

I screamed, and in doing so let all of the air out of my lungs.

I then instinctively tried to take a breath for air, but instead, I filled my lungs with dirty pond water.