The first time I ditched class, we went out to the swings behind the school.

You wore a white scarf, but it didn’t keep out the shivering from the cold that Death breathed down your neck, soaking you with bad memories and feelings that you could not describe. You trembled, alone in the middle of the hallway, frozen in earthquake of your mind.

Your sleeves were stained with prayer, praying for the pain to stop, for the demons to go away, praying for the silent war to end so you wouldn’t have to take up arms against the battle in your head.

As your mouth parted ways, sucking in breath that your lungs begged to stop and your soul begged to leave behind. But you sucked anyways, pained with the whispers that your brain exhaled into your ear, a repeating damnation that temptation will not let you fix. You staggered, your backpack swollen with the guilt of leaving class, and so I made you lean against me. I attacked the shackles of your sleeves, and desperately loosened your white noose of pity. And as I led you out the doors, your hand wrapped in mine, I felt your release, the bend of your bowed knees straightening as you tucked your mental arrows away in your quivering limbs.

I could see the pain in your eyes. I know we are selfish for keeping you here, in this hellish war that you call life. And I know they bomb you with phrases like “cheer up” and “get over it” and “it gets better” and storm your skies, calling you a faker, an attention whore, and selfish. And I know the last one stings the most, selfish, because the whole intent of ending it was to take your dreaded being, bruised with selfishness, immaturity, and disgust, out of their lives. I know you felt it was more selfish to stay than to leave. And I don’t know how you feel or what’s going through that head of yours, but there never was a need to know. You didn’t want another bandage, just covering up the pain, but you wanted an escape, a chance to find comfort, a chance to fly.

And so we ran away, to the back of the brick asylum, where the chains clinking with the wind echoed freedom. We were greeted by the cheering whispers of empty trash bags and slipped into the plastic seats. And as you pumped your legs, rising, I could see you again. Your scars glistened as if they were fresh, pleading for a fresh breath of Earth’s air to blow away the words that burrowed their way into your wounds.

So you flew, up and up and up, into the endless sky and against time and lines drawn to trap your coloring. And I flew with you, wondering how you, in your broken state with your crumpled dignity, let me have my identity back. You let me match my black boots and red rebellion with a voice that cried to the heavens that I was a teenager. And, as your white scarf fluttered with your blonde hair, I saw you. You were a dove, graced with the gift of giving inner peace, although the wings of your spirit had been long clipped. How feathers did they have to pluck for you to end up flying with a raven, decked in the red threads of anger? Why did they shatter the cast that encased your already-naked body, splintered so many times by the world’s hatred for your saddened eyes? But in the creak of the swing, you found comfort, like a dusty rocker on the porch of your ruined temple.

The more I stared at you, the more I saw you lose yourself to the momentum, and my mind wanted to define the pendulum of your ephemeral time with an equation. But I realized that no solution could soften the irrationality of your vile mentality that evaded the laws of reason despite your petition to stop. But, in that instant, you derived your freedom from repetition, the pumping and pumping of your legs clearing their reaction to your actions. And you proved Newton wrong, for, in that instant, no friction of your past could stop you. You were free and flying amongst the sky, and I? I sat back and watched the clouds hug you for the longest time and smiled in the silence of comfort.

But the more I wondered, the more numbers drifted by, numbing my fingers with the chilling familiarity of it all. I wondered how many times you planned your last days, counting off the hours until you could take your final breath and delve into the peace that you pined for. How much pain did you bear as you trained and trained and trained to hide it all away from the staring eyes of strangers that traced your scars like fingers vying to peel off your scabs? Did you expect to ever find comfort in the creaking of swings, kissing the celestial lips of the angels with my raven wings fluttering beside you? And as the minutes dripped by, we melted space and time into our own escape from the bars of our own minds. We screwed being prisoners of war, and staying jailbirds of the monsters in our head. We are birds of a feather, you and I, and we could fly.

So we flew. And you were a fugitive, baby, and I was a rebel.

And as the fire alarms went off, drilling the students into lines on the grass, we flew, legs pumping in a last-ditch effort to chase the wind before the wildfires of hell burned over us.