My mom had found me just as the setting sun abandoned me to a world layered in shades of deep violet. Crying and biting her lip, she hugged me. Squeezed me so tight my sandpaper eyes struggled to well up once more. “Why’d you run, baby?” “It hurts.” With gritted teeth, she told me to never scare her like that again. That the city was no place for a little boy to run wild. Grief was like a fever, she said. I just had to let it run its course. Sweat it out, just sweat it out, baby. She didn’t account for the fact that some fevers don’t break on their own. That sometimes you have to do something
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