Chapter One: The Spaces In Between

  Some of my earliest memories are of airports. Not the shiny terminals with gourmet coffee and duty-free shops, but the in-between spaces—the echo of footsteps down long corridors, the vibration in my chest as planes roared overhead, the way goodbyes hung heavier than our carry-ons. We moved often. England. Germany. Back to the States. Then somewhere else. My dad had already left the Air Force by then—shortly after I was born—but the habit of motion stuck with us like jet lag. He struggled to keep anything stable after the uniform came off. Jobs slipped through his hands. Dreams changed names. The only thing consistent was the packing tape.

  My mom—steady, grounded, a civilian on base—held the pieces together with quiet strength. She worked long hours, made lists, got things done. She didn’t complain, but you could see the tired in her eyes at night. Somehow, she made every new house feel like home, even if it was only for six months.

  My brother and I were opposites in many ways. He was younger than me, but you wouldn't know it by how he carried himself. Stoic, observant, with this quiet wisdom that made people listen when he finally spoke. He was the kind of kid who could walk onto any playground and walk off with three new best friends, but he never chased attention. It found him. I envied that. I watched him laughing, diving headfirst into connections I couldn’t imagine myself making. For me, people were like sandcastles near the tide—fascinating, but not meant to last. I kept a comfortable distance, even as I smiled and nodded. Not because I didn’t care, but because I knew better. Friends meant goodbyes. And I’d had enough of those.

  Still, my brother never gave up trying to pull me into his world. He’d nudge me into conversations, drag me along to meet the neighbor kids, hand me video game controllers I hadn’t asked for. And sometimes—just sometimes—I let myself pretend it could stick. That maybe this school, this town, this version of life could last longer than a season.

  We learned to navigate change like seasoned travelers. He made friends and said goodbye like a pro. I built walls and told myself it was easier this way. I can still remember the layout of a dozen houses we lived in, but the names of the kids next door? Gone. Faces blurred, voices forgotten. I used to think something was wrong with me. Now I wonder if it was just a quiet kind of survival—a subconscious armor shaped by constant motion.

  I remember the day we went to get the bike. My brother drove—he had just gotten his license—and we took the back roads out past the edge of town to meet some guy selling it out of his barn. It was an old motorcycle, nothing flashy, but it had weight to it. It felt like freedom. Like control. Like something that was mine in a world that constantly shifted. My brother didn’t say much on the way home, just gave me that half-smile of his and said, "Try not to die on it." I promised I wouldn't. At the time, I meant it.

  And then there was Seren.

  She showed up once in a dream when I was nine or ten—somewhere in Belgium or maybe Dover; it’s hard to say now. A girl with silver eyes and a voice like wind through leaves. She stood in the corner of my room while I slept and whispered something I couldn’t quite hear. When I blinked, she was gone. I never told anyone. Not because I was afraid, but because it felt like she belonged only to me. Over the years, she would return in dreams that didn’t feel like dreams. Always just out of reach, always watching. Sometimes I wonder if I invented her out of loneliness, or if she was something else entirely. A signal. A memory from another place.

  My childhood wasn’t painful. It was warm, full of laughter and safe beds and family dinners. But it always felt… suspended. Like I was living between realities, waiting for the real story to begin.

  And maybe it did—on a narrow mountain road, years later, when time stopped and my heart did too.

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  But that’s getting ahead of myself.

  This story starts with movement, with uncertainty, with a boy who didn’t know how to stay still. A boy whose brother believed in connection while quietly carrying more wisdom than anyone gave him credit for. A boy who didn’t yet understand that sometimes the most important truths live in the spaces in between.

  The late '80s and early '90s felt like a constant hum—TVs buzzing in the background, cassette tapes winding themselves into knots, radios playing half-static pop songs that still echo in my bones. There was something about that era that felt both weightless and heavy at once. Maybe it was the denim. Maybe it was the air.

  By then, my brother and I had grown into the kind of bond that wasn’t just shared—it was tested. I was the instigator, the rule-bender, the one who’d jump the fence just to see what was on the other side. He was the conscience I pretended not to hear but always brought with me anyway. I’d drag him into trouble like a shadow, and he followed—not because he wanted to, but because he wanted me to be okay. He never said much, but when he did, it cut straight to the heart of things. I respected that about him. Still do.

  Our parents were always working. Dad tried—he really did—but he was better at starting things than finishing them. Mom picked up the slack, pulled doubles, kept bills paid, and still managed to pack our lunches with little notes sometimes. “Be good,” they’d say on their way out the door. And we’d nod. Then the door would click shut, and I’d already be planning something we shouldn’t be doing.

  Some of it was innocent mischief—sneaking out late to meet friends, playing chicken with curfews, stealing bikes that we’d always return later. But some of it was darker. Testing boundaries. Seeing how far I could push before the universe pushed back.

  And then she showed up.

  Her name was Mariah. She moved in three houses down during a sweltering July, all bangs and braces and oversized jackets with patches sewn on the sleeves. She had a Walkman glued to her hip and a gaze that could stop time. I don’t remember what song was playing the first time we spoke, but I swear my ears have rung ever since.

  She wasn’t like the other girls. She didn’t ask where I was from, didn’t care what school I’d been to last. She talked about dreams—wild ones—and the way she said things made it sound like she lived in a different frequency. Something clicked. Or maybe short-circuited. Either way, I was hooked.

  We started hanging out every day. Sneaking cigarettes behind the corner store. Swapping stories like they were currency. One time, we climbed the water tower behind the old football field just to watch the stars. “Do you ever feel like none of this is real?” she asked, legs dangling, eyes fixed on the sky. “Like we’re all just… characters in someone else’s dream?” I didn’t know what to say, but the question stayed with me.

  It wasn’t long before we started experimenting. First it was weed. Mariah had a stash hidden in her sock drawer and a lighter shaped like a shark. We got high in the woods behind her house the first time, laughing so hard we forgot our own names. Then came the pills—nothing hard, just whatever she could sneak from her aunt’s medicine cabinet or swipe from her stepdad’s nightstand. Painkillers, muscle relaxers. Anything that blurred the edges.

  She introduced it all, but I wasn’t reluctant. Not even a little. If anything, I was grateful. The drugs gave everything a filter, like wrapping the world in gauze. And when people started noticing our behavior—teachers, parents, even my brother—they chalked it up to that. Just a couple of teenagers getting into the usual trouble.

  But the truth was, it wasn’t the drugs making reality strange. It was the strangeness making the drugs feel normal.

  I think that’s when things started to shift inside me. Like there was a crack forming between the world I knew and something deeper—something I couldn’t name yet.

  My brother didn’t like her. He said she made me reckless. Maybe she did. But I needed that. I needed to feel something—anything—beyond the constant gray of moving, behaving, pretending to care about futures I hadn’t chosen.

  Eventually, we got caught doing something dumb—shoplifting, I think. My brother took the fall. Said it was all him. That broke something in me. Not because we got in trouble, but because he still believed I could be better. That I was worth the risk.

  That night, I stared at the ceiling and thought about Mariah, about the way her fingers brushed mine when she passed me a note, about the look in my brother’s eyes when the principal called our parents.

  And I wondered—for the first time—if love was supposed to feel like freedom, or if it was just another illusion we wrapped ourselves in to feel less alone.