Flight and Regret

The silence after the storm was a different kind of violence. It wasn't the roar of sirens or the crackle of gunfire, but a hollow echo that swallowed everything. LaShawn and I, we ran. Not just from the scene, but from the very air that had become thick with accusation. Thousands of miles, that’s how far we put between ourselves and the ghost of what had happened. Every mile was a desperate attempt to outrun the memory, to outrun the feeling of my own failure. We were supposed to be untouchable, invincible. That's what we’d built, brick by bloody brick. And in one blinding flash, it all crumbled.

I remember the cold metal of the bus seat against my cheek, the endless blur of streetlights painting streaks across the grimy window. LaShawn sat beside me, her eyes wide and vacant, reflecting the same terror that was a constant knot in my gut. We barely spoke. What was there to say? Every word felt like a betrayal of Alvin, of the life we’d lost. We were fugitives, not just from the law, but from ourselves. The law. They’d wanted us, sure, but this… this was something else. This was a predator that had stalked us from the shadows, a phantom that had ripped through our carefully constructed world.

The guilt was a heavy blanket, suffocating me. I saw Alvin’s face in every passing stranger, heard his laugh in the wind. He was supposed to be here, right beside me, ready to take on whatever came our way. He was my shield, my brother, and in that moment, I’d never felt more exposed, more vulnerable. The thought of him, alone, facing that… it was a raw wound that refused to heal. And then there was LaShawn. She’d been there, right in the thick of it. The enemy hadn’t come for me, not directly. They’d come for what was mine, for what I held dear, and in doing so, they’d taken a piece of her too. Her sister, my wife to be.