She cried herself to sleep every night, and held her cotton teddy close. Her parents had pillow fights with furniture, and sang violent songs of rage to bleeding ears.

It was a helpless feeling that she embraced between herself and the sheets.

But as the days wore on, a thick fog of repetitive misery hung at her eyes. She tried to rub it away, but it held on. It followed her like a starving stray dog, and the more she tried to push it away, the tighter it held to her. It gripped her neck and whispered secrets of hatred to the hairs extending from her spine. It wouldn’t leave her.

Until the day she decided to run. She ran faster than she felt she ever could. And the fog tagged behind just far enough that she could capture glimpses of the world passing her by between the swirling entrails. It only caught her when she lie face down in the mud with cuts along her cheekbones and scrapes at her knees. But the pain pulled reality to her cracking lips, and held the sky within her eye’s reflection.

After that moment, she never cried again. She sacrificed the lifeless embraces of her cotton bear in return for the light kisses the wind left on her freckles. She forgot the tender girl inside, and, instead, pricked her fingers with burrs during her spare time.

As she grew, the pillow fights between her parents became more spaced. But she didn’t notice. She had picked up a job down the street at a diner for minimum wage. Before her seventeenth birthday, she’d saved enough dirty cash for a Hurley with the suspension of an angel. And while the other girls were riding boys and ponies, her legs hung around cold metal. Her arms became leather, and her hair fell at the kiss of a barber’s blade.

Days later, she woke with the sun and left before the c*** had a chance to crow. Her parents never stopped their pillow fights long enough to notice she’d left. (That’s what she told herself when they never came looking.) She had abandoned her warm bed, and the open arms of a child’s toy.

However, she never stopped running because she liked the way the wind felt against her face.