Goodbye
Chapter 1
“Tyler, you know the consequences for your actions are going to be not what you hoped for,” said the principal sternly to Tyler.

The principal's office felt huge to Tyler, his parents sitting to the left of him and principal in front.

Tyler, in tears, wondered why his life had been shattered and how he could fix it. He wanted to go back and see how he started this, how he became who he was what he did.

He was always a boy getting into trouble, he lived at the thinking stool like it was his own home. Tyler was full of himself,  didn’t share, and was a distraction to everyone during class. The teacher would call in parent teacher conferences with him at least once a month. One time in fifth grade, Tyler was in class talking to one of his friends and it was time to clean up the past activity that everyone had been working on. Tyler, on the other hand, had different plans.

He decided to break every single crayon that he could, and he did. Tyler broke every crayon that he could find and didn’t hesitate. He especially hated the yellow crayons. He and others sent out to break literally every single yellow crayon they could find. By snapping them, drawing insanely hard with them until they broke down and were nothing.

The teacher screamed in Tyler’s face “WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING!”.

Tyler in terror ran out of the room.

Tyler’s parents were called later that day and said Tyler was a major disruption during class. They were told the entire story about the crayons and were forced to pay for the broken crayons. The amount was almost $20 which doesn’t seem bad at all. The family was very wealthy, but the amount of embarrassment was unreal.

Tyler knew that he was a bad kid but he had soon realized it after this instance. He planned on changing his ways and becoming a better person all around. After his brief meeting with the principal and his parents he got into the car and his dad drove him home. In the car he yelled at Tyler for his actions.

He pounded his fist on the dashboard “Do you realize the stress that you are putting on your mother and I, it’s unbearable, Tyler I do love you but that doesn’t mean that I need to like you, I don’t want to be around you. Nobody does…”

Tyler felt like he had been stabbed through the chest, those words destroyed him. The words, but that doesn’t mean that I need to like you, kept on echoing in his head. The thought in Tyler’s head was playing over and over again like a broken record.

Later on in his childhood everything would change, his dad abusive and it destroyed him...

One day Tyler made a decision

Chapter 2
I ran away about two months ago, to escape all the yelling and physical injuries of my parents. Every night I would go home and an hour or so later my mom and dad would get home and the first thing I always heard was one of them yelling at the other "Go to hell you idiot! You screwed up again!" and that was always just the beginning of it. I'd barricade my door shut every night, the only times I would leave my room were if I was going to a friends house, going to school, or to get dinner.

Then one night when my dad slapped me across the face before dinner when I was trying to get him to stop yelling at mom, I ran up the stairs to my room and started bawling my eyes out.

I saw an old, really big backpack of mine sitting over by my door and decided I was packing it up and running away! I decided I'd figure out where I was staying later, and for now just get out of my house. I quietly snuck down the stairs, and out the front door with what felt like one thousand pounds of luggage on me. I stood outside the front door staring at the long hardly illuminated road ahead of me and asked myself... Am I doing the right thing?

            I decided I was. I was absolutely sick of all the heartache and pain my parents had caused me. I needed an escape from it and just running seemed like the best and most liked option. Anyway it's as if my parents wouldn’t even notice I was gone... They're always too busy fighting to even acknowledge me. That just helped me make my decision even more final.

I was way way past DONE I was also way past GONE!

Looking at the long road ahead of me I started walking, bundling myself up in my sweater. Every time I passed under a street light all I could see was my breath, and every time I walked back into the dark, I saw constant replays of why I ran in the first place.

Chapter 3
             It was getting colder, and I realized I still hadn't found a place to stay for the night. I decided to high-tail it to the park on the far end of town for the night.

As soon as I got there I walked over to the biggest tree in the park, that as right beside the fire. I climbed up the tree into the town tree house that all the town kids-including myself-made a year or two ago. Once I was inside I walked over to the window closest to the town fire and set up my sleeping bag and blanket. I crawled in and tried getting comfy. When I finally found a comfy position to lay in, I lay there, hoping sleepiness would eventually set in.

After what felt like six days of laying there, I finally decided to click the light button on my watch to see the time. It read 3:57, yet I still wasn't tired. I was debating between getting up and just keep trying to sleep, when suddenly sleepiness set in and I was out like a light.

When I woke up I hastily shoved my things into my bad and walked toward the tree house door. I moved so fast that I could of been an olympian, fastest time set putting random things into a bag.
                    
Once I was out of the tree house, and back on the ground I began to walk straight out of town. I walked virtually aimlessly for the whole day. Around the hour that would normally be dinner, I began to get seriously hungry. I walked around a bit longer to see if I could find somewhere to stay.

Suddenly I came across an old barn in the middle of nowhere! I decided it was good enough, and went inside. I walked around the barn until I'd found an extremely out of the way spot to lay out my sleeping bag and eat some food. I ate and was very shortly after out like a light.

I woke up really late in the evening to the sound of a storm outside the barn. I decided I'd just get up and walk around, because the sounds outside were too loud to sleep with. While walking around I found an old looking notebook and some pens. I took the pens and notebook over to where I had set up camp. I looked through the notebook and it was all stuff written by someone roughly the same age as me. It was a runaway journal.

It read of a person someone like me that ran away too, I read it. It described someone who was regretting running away from home though. They missed where they used to be.

The problem was that they forgot where to go. I realized that I missed home. I missed home like a soldier missed his family, or how astronauts miss space. I walked for days on end to find my house but I couldn’t. When I stopped a car on the road and asked for help they gave me a phone.

Chapter 4
I dialed 911.

A police car later picked me up and I had learned that my parents had gotten into a drunk fight. My mom was killed and my father placed in prison for life, because of murder. Running away changed me as a person like I was newborn. I moved into my grandparents house and have lived with them since.

My mother's death was my fault, he took it out on her while he was drunk, I wasn’t there to protect her. I don’t regret that I never said goodbye to him.