What the fuck. What the fuck? 

I'm finally outside that godforsaken school. But I can't go to that rehabilitation centre. I just can't. I can't be just another happy-go-lucky shopper consuming their life away. I can't just not feel all these feelings that I know I need to feel. 

I have to get out. No matter what. 

I leave the school, and start walking down the empty alleyways towards a random direction. I'm not going home. I can't go home. And I can't go back to school either. The price is too high. 

I don't know where I'm going. I'm probably going nowhere. I'll probably wander and waste away in these streets until the day I die. The thought fills me with apprehension. I know that it's a tough life ahead of me. A blazing, burning, freezing, hungry, thirsty, desperate life in front of me. With nothing but the clothes on my back and my own resourcefulness. It's going to be hard. Beyond hard. 

But still, I'm not as afraid as I should be. A type of courage, a type of strength and resolve wells up inside my chest, radiates throughout my body. It warms me. Pushes me forwards. And I know that I can do it. With this strange sort of courage, with this illogical sense of strength, I can take on any adversity and misery and I can stay strong and keep pushing through it. 

I keep walking. And walking. And walking and walking and walking. And the city screams around me. But in my exhaustion and my cold, it doesn't feel quite so grating anymore. It feels like a beast I must fight. A beast I must hide from. A beast I must go straight into the belly of if I am to preserve myself. It feels like a beast I can take on. 

I keep walking in a random direction. And the world seems to sing around me. It feels like finally, finally, finally I am entering freedom. A terrible sort of freedom, with nothing and no-one on my side. Nothing and no-one to take care of me. Nothing but unending need. But it feels like freedom nonetheless. And I welcome it with bended knee and raised up head and open arms. 

I walk down random alleyways, turning and curving and bending and twisting my path whenever I feel like it. The point is to create a trail that the police cannot follow. A trail that no-one can follow. The point is to end up somewhere without anyone knowing where I ended up. Not even myself. 

I feel connected to the quickly-dipping temperatures around me. As if I am a part of the weather cycle itself. I feel connected to the slowly-darkening sky around me. As if I am a part of the nocturnal-diurnal cycle itself. There isn't any nature in this city. Not really. Just trees and bushes and flowers that are adorned with gaudy baubles. That are fenced in and kept far away from their wild homelands. That are hung for display in horrific styles. But still, there are parts of nature in the city nonetheless. There is the weather, the air, the sunlight, the cold, the heat, the darkness, the sky. I feel as if this nature is cutting into me and infusing me with itself and I am melting into it until we are one and the same.

It's an utterly glorious sensation, as painful as it is. 

I have never felt this way before in my life. Part of me wants to never feel this way again. To be comfortable and to bask in my comfort. But the stronger, surer part of me revels in this feeling. In the constant flowingness of being left out in the elements. Of being utterly free to take me wherever my feet take me. Part of me wants to never give it up, these feelings and these experiences. 

And I will never give them up. I promise myself that I won't. Even when the early winter sinks down towards midwinter, and I'm freezing, and I'm dying. I promise myself that I won't give up this feeling. I won't give up this oneness with the tiny pieces of nature I can access. I won't give up this bravery. 

Even when thirst burns in my throat, reminding me that I have a body and that I can feel pain, that I can feel unimaginable violence. Still, I won't give up. I won't let weakness overcome me. I won't look for comfort when I could instead have glory. 

When hunger gnaws at my gut and my chest. And I feel like I have died already. I feel like a ghost in torture. Still I will keep going. I'll keep going through the hunger and I will let myself feel it and I will let myself feel real.

The press of the future laid out ahead of me is sitting like a stone in my chest. Terrible. Terrifying. Tremendous. But it's also soaring like an ink-feathered and beautiful raven through the electric blue of twilight. Free. Mystical. Promising. 

All around me I can feel magic. My life feels like magic. My heart feels like magic. In a way it has never felt before. I am a free person now. Completely free to be who I am. To be who I'm meant to be. 

Sure, I will be in pain. I will be in immense pain. But there will be no-one there to tell me what to do. There will be no-one there to tell me what to want. What to work towards. Who to be. How to exist.

I will simply let my emotions carry me wherever they will and I will think and feel whatever thoughts and feelings flow through my mind. 

I think of my parents. How they never saw me. Not for who I was anyways. How they loved me for who they wanted me to be. Who they thought I could've been if I tried hard enough. For who I never wanted to be. They saw me as the idealized version of the perfect girl and as a lazy, impetuous brat both at the same time. 

I won't miss them. Not really. I think maybe I should. I think maybe I eventually will. When the days go by and by and I am left with only myself for company. I might come to realize that they held a place in my heart that cannot be filled. 

I still will not go back. 

I don't care if I miss them. My freedom is more important. My ability to be who my heart calls out for me to be is more important. More important than any pain. Including the pain of grief. 

I wonder if hunger and thirst and heat and cold will eventually crush my resolve. I wonder if they will cause me to turn back and rush home, into the waiting arms of the rehabilitation centre. 

I wonder if this bravery that I'm feeling won't last. 

I vow to make it last. Even if this feeling of infallible resilience doesn't stay, even if I find it harder and harder to hold on, I will cling to any shreds of strength that I have and use them to keep myself together. I have to use them to keep myself from going back. Even if it's a desperate struggle, I must fight for my personhood. 

The night is dark around me now. I have been walking for hours. But I must keep walking. I must make myself untraceable. I must walk until my very feet bleed and I can find somewhere safe to collapse. 

I'm not tired. Not even a little bit. I wonder at myself. How? How am I not tired yet? How are my feet almost as light as they were when I first started this journey? I think maybe my fear is fuelling me. My fear any my hope, and whatever strange, marvellous emotions are in this intoxicating mixture. 

I don't feel hunger and I feel it both at the same time. My insides feel empty. Aching. But not aching in a way that hurts. Simply aching in a way that is simply there. I feel detached from it. Detached and muted, as feelings swirl through my heart. 

Thirst, too has not come yet. I wonder why. Is it because of the cold? Is it because I have not eaten? Is it because of all the excitement of the day? 

No matter. I can deal with the hunger and thirst when it finally comes. And by deal with I mean willfully ignore.

I wonder if all the built-up hunger and thirst will eventually break through whatever dam is keeping them at bay and crash over me like a terrible tsunami. I wonder how horrible the pain will be when it finally comes. How unendurable. 

However unendurable it is I will simply have to endure it. 

I think about the history I learned in school. About the people who had been taken through the desert without food or water. How they had eventually died of exhaustion and need. 

I feel a strange sense of camaraderie with these people. We are one and the same. Walking. Walking. Walking until we die. They are my comrades. But at the same time we are different. They didn't choose such a torturous life and death. I did. 

I feel the wind blow over my body, sending tingles of chill through me. The wind caresses me like a lover. Like a child. Like a mother. When I die - and I will die - when I die, it will be in the wind's arms. It might even be by the wind's hand. It will be so beautiful. So perfect. So right. 

I'll be surrounded by something that loves me. Finally. After years upon years upon years upon years of of being lost and empty. After years of being wandering and alone. Years of having no family, no friends, no-one. Of dashing my heart against the cold, sterile walls of the hallways that made up my world. 

If I am loved enough to be killed by something, then that's the ultimate love. It's the ultimate form of intimacy. It's the ultimate form of setting someone free. The ultimate caress. The ultimate embrace. 

I wonder why I'm thinking such morbid thoughts. But I know why. I easily know. It's because death is all that's in store for me right now. Death and the ultimate freedom it brings, and the smaller freedom stretched out before me until then. 

I wonder if I'll be as accepting of death when it finally does come. I tell myself that I have to be. I have to take it. There is no getting out of this. Not alive. And I have to hold on however I can. 

I have to keep going. 

[scene continued in next part]