#Trust30

So running's been on the back-burner lately. A mix of laziness and insane scheduling kept me from the roads and trails for the last month or so. In an effort to re-establish some discipline, I'm going to be taking part in the #Trust30 Challenge from The Domino Project. Over the next 30 days I'll be responding to prompts posted each day.

Today's prompt:
We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.
1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.
(Author: Gwen Bell)

A young boy stands on the edge of the sand right where the water begins to lap away at the shells and rocks and driftwood pieces washed ashore. He's come here or years with his family and he doesn't know what he'll do if they ever decide to get rid of their place at the beach. A few yards down the shore his parents and younger brother lounge on blankets and play in the sand. But our hero has weightier thoughts to think and he needs the distance, the space between him and the others.

For most every twelve-year-old boy the trouble comes when a girl doesn't know he exists. For our young man the issue is quite different: she knows him well and yet there is no changing the cosmic order of the world. She will always be a friend and he will always be a friend and that is how it will be until the end of time or middle school, whichever happens first.

He picks up a shell and tosses it towered the water. His feet sink into the sand as the waves lap over his feet and recede into the ground and back out to sea. His heart aches and he wonders how anyone could ever begin to understand the pain and the anguish in his too-small heart. Tears well up but he wipes them away quick as they come. The breeze blows past his ears and the waves crash and rumble in the shallows.

The breeze carries his mother's voice to him and he turns his face to her. It's time to head in and he jogs back to the blankets and his family. With each step the pain subsides and he's smiling when he reaches them. As they walk to the dunes he takes his mother's hand, not noticing the absence of a wedding ring or the growing space between the two people he loves the most.

(Not as uplifting as I'd thought but there it is!)

Ryan