I creep back down the stairs blanketed with darkness. When I get to my bedroom door, I quietly take one last still earful in before closing the door ever so slowly so the latch doesn’t click. Once it’s closed, I contemplate the pros and cons of locking it.
I lock it.
Making my way over to my bed completely relying on muscle memory in the darkness, I climb up and open my window as slowly as possible. Then I unhinge the screen and quietly place it on the ground outside. Hanging halfway out the window I wonder what the best maneuver for dismounting would be.
Once I hit the dirt, I stand still in the pitch-black silence. Trying to reassure myself no one is coming; I haven’t been caught.
I take three slow steps out from under the overhanging deck above me and my left foot makes a loud crunch in the snow. I stop. Look around, listen, and deliberate over whether running or enduring each crunch slowly would be best.
I make a run for it.
Once I hit the road, I turn back to make sure there’s no sign of movement within the house. The coast seems clear, so I decide to walk the rest of the way.
As I walk down the road only lit by the infinite number of stars above, I can just barely see my breath leading my way. The snow is crunching and slushing beneath my feet and I can hear branches break beneath unknown creature’s feet within the woods flanking me. I’m filled with unsettling fear. Fear I might get caught, fear of something or someone emerging from the darkness and harming me, fear of what I’ve gotten myself into all together.
My adrenaline is pounding in my ears and just as I reach the trailer steps I decide to turn around and run back… except the door swings open and a familiar face invites me in.
When I was a teenager, I was a pretty good kid… for the most part.
I got good grades; I came home on time for curfew… usually.
I hung-out with good kids… generally.
Ok… so maybe when I said I was a pretty good kid, I mostly meant in comparison to my older brothers HA
Anyways, despite my best efforts to make good choices… I did make a number of bad ones in my adolescence.
One of which being the time I decided it was a good idea to sneak out of the house at 15 years old or so and walk half a mile down the road in the middle of the night, in the snow, to party with one of my best friends at the time… and a bunch of people who were out of high school, probably five or six years older than me.
I partied all night and returned home just before dawn. My mom never knew… until now.
Uhh… surprise! Sorry! The good news is; I’m alive… I survived it unscathed.
Don’t worry, Mom, even though you never got the pleasure of grounding me for this, I do vividly remember you waking me up (lights on, blankets off, loudly doing whatever it was you felt the unrelenting urge to be doing so very early in the morning, so very close to my sleeping quarters) about an hour after I crawled through the window and fell asleep insisting I get started on that chore list.
Also, I’m sure karma will repay me tenfold in a few years…