Highway with Green Apples

by Bae Suah

I am one week away from my twenty-fifth birthday. I hate being that age. That age is neither as fresh and full of life as fifteen years nor as jaded as the afternoon of thirty-five years. I never know what the next day will bring, so I am always uneasy.

How long is an ocean of time? Feelings as countless as grains of sand. Distances as far-flung as the sky. How much is that, I wonder.

I can’t tell her that I ran away simply because I felt like it.

But that’s how it is. Nothing ever ends the way it begins. How could it?

“I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”