Redemption

THE LIFESPAN OF AN AVERAGE HUMAN BEING

She ended up in my sweater seconds after getting in the truck. Our fingers were intertwined on the seat between us. We hadn't spoken a word since leaving the pizza parlor. It wasn't awkward. It felt like contentment. And since neither of us got a phone call nor text asking where we were, neither of us were in a rush to get home.

I heard thunder roll overhead as the rain pelted my windshield. Sawyer was the opposite of her brother. He packed an emergency bag for tornado preparation when it started getting dark outside. She's sticking her hand out the window to feel the rain against her skin.

The worst part about autumn storms was waking up in the morning to find the burnt leaves had fallen from the trees. The worst part about tonight? I'm going to pull into the driveway, and the curly-haired girl is going to disappear into her room tonight.

And since we weren't getting any messages or phone calls, I pulled off the highway. When I turned onto a backroad cover in tress, she cocked her head in curiosity. When I made it to the edge of the cliff, where the city sat before us in its glory, I killed the power to my truck.

"I love the sound of rain," she breathed out.

My head fell back, watching her relax against the seat. I noted how her chest seemed to rise as slowly as it fell. The muscles in her shoulder looked more relaxed than they ever have like her worries washed away in the storm.

I knew about the war raging in her head. Still, I've never seen someone look so at peace.

What I would do to hear about the horrors happening in her head. Would it help ease the terror? Or would it make her even more nervous to know someone was in on the story? She'd never be able to hide then, and it's something she's good at.

"I can feel you staring at me."

Her head rolled to the side to look at me as I grinned. "Because I am."

I could almost hear her smiling, but watching it happen had been even better.

"Why do you think we're envious of people's ability to change?"

The space between my eyebrows crinkled. "Are you?"

"Fletcher was able to change and I'm envious of that."

"Why?"

"Because I'm wondering why I haven't."

I watched that smile on her face slowly fade. "Fletcher didn't become a different person overnight. He suffered from nightmares until he didn't. I can't tell you when I stopped waking him up from the terrors of his mind, but one night we went to sleep, and we made it through the whole night."

"How long did it take for him to get there?"

I shrugged, unable to answer her question. "Change didn't happen because he grew accustomed to the pain. He accepted his past. He realized life didn't happen to him. It happened for him."

"What does that mean, though? I've tried making sense of it, and pretending like there's some lesson to be learned for people being terrible humans has me lost because I don't know why it had to happen, and I don't know how to change."

"You want to know the key to change? It's that nothing changes and everything changes. The world continues to spin, and you wake up every day breathing, but how you breathe today compared to how you breathed yesterday is different."

"It feels like the pain will never go away."

"It doesn't, but once we accept why we feel the way we do and understand why we never deserve to feel like that again, we can accept our pain. It starts to hurt a little less and make a lot more sense."