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We were so young when we decided to do it.

We were only in third grade. We were only eight years old. We were only children.

"Do you wanna run away?" I asked her, one day while we were sitting at lunch.

She looked at me, wide-eyed, with those brown eyes of hers. "Run away?"

I nodded my head furiously. "Yeah! I've been thinkin' about how to run away forever!"

I know we thought it would be fun. We thought it would be fun because we were innocent. We thought it would be fun because we were ignorant of how the world worked.

"I tried to go out and take my pink sleeping bag with me," I chirped as she slowly devoured her Nutella sandwich. "I was gonna pack my backpack with some snack bars for later. And a pillow, too."

She wiped off her mouth with a napkin, unlike I did. She was Korean, I was American. We came from two different cultures. She had been taught to be neat. I had been taught to wipe my face with the back of my hand by my grandfather. Though he was joking at the time, I had picked up the habit.

"Where did you go to?" she asked, feet impatiently swinging underneath the blue plastic chairs of the cafeteria.

"I didn't get to go anywhere," I admitted. And yes, the first time, I had never gotten to go anywhere.

Why not?

I was too afraid. I was too afraid of running off. As young as I was, I wasn't allowed to leave the house on my own, and my greatest fear was being in trouble with my parents. I barely made it to the treeline of our little red house when I decided to sprint all the way back to the door.

"Oh." For a moment, she seemed disappointed. And despite the resounding chatter of all the excited classmates sitting around us, the room was absolutely silent.

"Do you wanna run away tomorrow?"

I looked up at her, into her eyes. My nod was quick and immediate. But that wasn't when the mistake was made. That was only part of that. That was, might I admit with my struggling mind, barely the beginning.

I don't even remember how the rest of it went. I can't remember. Either it hurts too much or the memories are lost to time and grief. I can recall vaguely what occurred between us, and how our thought processes went, and how wicked and cruel the outside world truly was, and how we saw through our rose-colored lenses of life that were tainted with dreams of living in a cardboard box for a house and finding stuffed toys on the street to play with. I can recall the biggest things.

But the little things-- the time we shared together, the laughs we had, the bubbling excitement for what it would be like to escape-- I can no longer fathom.

We did not end up running away the very next day. We did, however, try-- and in the process of trying, we discovered the way the gates opened and closed, how the metal bars fit together, and how nothing had to be unlocked for us to make our escape. We planned, sketching in our big pink notebooks, and we wrote in our fresh cursive handwriting, and we talked with vigor about what the future would hold, smiles on our faces.

It was all a mistake. It was all so terrible. And no one had any idea.

I think that's the worst part about this whole thing. All this time we had spent going over our plan of escape, the passegways we would use to our advantage, and not one teacher stepped in to stop us. All the instructors cared about were our grades, which were otherwise doing fine, and that was the end of their concern. Our health, our imaginations-- those things were nothing.

School was all that mattered.

And school was where we ran away.

It was the fateful date of September 10th, 2017, recess time. She was checking around the corner to make sure no teachers were rounding the playfield on patrol. Once she concluded that no one was coming, she nodded firmly in my direction. I was meant to go first so that she could stay back and watch.

I sprinted toward the metal-bar gate. It had no lock, and it was left wide open like the jaws of a beckoning, evil snake. I ran right into those jaws, carrying my lunchbox behind me, and then turned to her, waving her to follow.

She came. I distinctly recall the sound of her pink sandals hitting the ground. The dry dirt of the walking path sprayed up behind her. It left the mark of footprints, telling any camera, any teacher, any police officer, any detective, any mourning parent where we had escaped from.

But no one ever knew why. Only us. None could fathom what ideas we had in our small imaginations but us. The very thought of leaving behind the school-only world we lived in was enough to awaken our hearts, and so off we went. Once both of us had made it out of the gate, I peeked back around the brick building set for kindergarteners, wondering if anyone had seen.

If anyone had, they were too late to stop us.

I remember the day. It was breezy, but warm, and sunspots sprinkled themselves in between the shadows of tree limbs. Little brambles lined the beige walkway, accompanied by the occasional fallen leaf. The seasons were changing.

I remember the look on her face, too. She was elated to be out of the confines of those darning metal gates. Breaking a rule, a rule that had not even been set, a rule that was never even thought of because no dumb white child with a grade above a C would ever think of it, felt incredible. I could see it in her eyes, as we stood still in the afternoon light. I could see it in everything about her.

I remember, most of all, the feeling of it. The feeling of butterflies making my stomach float and sink, sending my mind reeling with thoughts of what future we would have out on our own, what things we would do, what places we would go, what people we would meet. I felt scared and anticipatory all at once. My head swimming, reeling, terrified, ecstatic, I managed, through my mishmash of color-splash thoughts from my rush of childhood psychedelia, to grasp her hand. That was our signal.

And we ran away.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot possibly comprehend what we hoped to accomplish. I cannot possibly understand why we ever left in the first place. It may have been something to do with wanting to be free from the shackles of school, the expectations of our parents, wanting to explore what the world had in store for us. It was some dream of ours to live out on our own, at the young age of 8, not knowing that life outside involved money, involved taxes, involved payments, involved working, involved careers and minimum wage, involved politics and presidents and protests. Not knowing that life outside involved driving and cars.

And accidents.

We made it to the sidewalk and we kept on running. There was no looking back at the giant clock tower of our red brick schoolhouse, no returning to our former selves. We had the clothes on our bodies, the shoes on our feet, and the snacks packed away in our lunchboxes. We had each other and the air we breathed. That was all we had.

I don't remember the paths we took. We never had a pinpointed destination for ourselves. We only wanted to escape. We followed the sidewalks as much as we could, marveling at how the world was without rules or laws or times to be at places. We looked both ways before crossing the streets. Then we were gone.

I never knew what happened at the school. I assume the teachers lined everyone up, same as they always had done, blowing their whistles into the ears of listening students who would one day be deafened by the sound. Perhaps everyone marched back into the building in their usual loud fashion, stomping their feet without purpose on the tiled floors. Perhaps the classmates sat down at their desks, and there were two empty desks, and no one noticed until our parents arrived at the school expecting to pick up their children and only found those two empty, desolate plastic chairs. Only found our colorful backpacks painted with clouds and rainbows and kittens. Only found the teachers that forgot about the two little children until it was too late to go back.

But those are all just assumptions. I don't know what happened, and I never will know. Unless the forces that gave up six years ago decide to resume their search and find me here, alone.

I used to not be alone. We used to be together. The first night away from home was a nightmare as we struggled to find a place to sleep. Alleys were dangerous and stank of darkness and excrement. Crawlspaces were crowded with spiders and angry rats. We were too afraid to go door to door and ask someone to take us in. And we felt ashamed that we could not find a bathroom for ourselves.

We slept, finally, in a small forested area, knowing that was the safest place for us together. We survived on our water bottles and our little snack bars until we finally fell asleep, and the sleep was restless. I was scared of the dark as a child, and I was always holding her hand whenever I woke in the midst of the night, mortified. She managed to comfort me, even when I could not see her face, but only the moonbeams from above that cast ghastly black creatures along the forest floor. Both of us slept the rest of the first night through.

Being together with her made everything easier. We substituted for things we needed, things we never thought about. We stuck together, our hands glued for fear of losing each other to the crowds. It was on the third day, just as the sun was breaking over the horizon between the trees, that I realized we had to leave the city. People meant capture, capture meant parents, parents meant being chastised, and being chastised meant getting in trouble and returning to school. No one would find us if we ventured off into the verdant hills of countryside that were so often told of in fairy tales.

I told her about what I thought. And we set off. We set off for those lands that didn't exist-- those lands that only lived and thrived beyond the realm of reality, behind the line of imagination. Those green fields that weren't where we thought they were.

We traveled as far as we dared. If only I could remember everything about it. We walked on foot in the cities, seeing the news reports about us having "vanished in broad daylight," and started hiding more often than not. We changed ourselves, living as nocturnal people over a longer period of time, fleeing from the world and any sight of civilians. Sometimes, if I felt brave, I'd dig into a clothing donation bin and search for anything that fit, but those were often in parking lots-- lots that stank, reeked with the scent of people, and were observed by fellas staring down at cameras from the lightpoles. I had a similarly risky solution for finding food.

She came with me most everywhere, but we thought it would be better if we went separately to crowded places so as not to be caught together. If one of us disappeared, the other would find her own way in the world and not have to be taken away. We switched, sometimes, and she would go to the food drives, hiding her face from the people and only taking the food we needed to survive, and I would go looking for a scrapped tent or the remnants of a broken umbrella in the woods when it rained.

We were sick, I recall. Always, always sick. We had little reprieve from the sickness, as we had no choice but to stay out in the rain. We huddled together, her and I, as the days dragged on and on and on. But even as we suffered-- and I can't bring myself to understand why-- we did not give in. As the world emptied all of its horrid things on top of our unsteady heads, we did not give up.

How ignorant we were, wanting to live on our own.

I don't know how, but the years passed. We learned about ourselves. We fought. I yelled, she cried, and it went in this cycle for a long time. The title of "best friends forever" started to die away around the age of 10, when both of us began the journey to slowly becoming women, and we were frustrated. Not only with each other, but with ourselves. We were frustrated at the sky, at the ground, at the sidewalks, at the way the street smelled and the apartments were moldy and icky. We were frustrated, too, at the food pantries and at the donation boxes, which had less and less things in them the farther we went into the urban city. People were becoming unkind. Our supplies became less. Our hope became less.

Our dreams were fragile things. But we were children, and we never knew how hard it would be to face a world that we had never seen before.

I can recall vividly an evening where I wept. All I did was weep. All I could do was weep. I wanted us to be friends, to be best friends forever, and it didn't look like we were going to be. Nothing about our situation looked like we thought it would when we were 8. We weren't living in a cardboard box house. We hadn't found any toys to play with. We hadn't received sympathy from people like we thought we would.

I was afraid that I was going to lose her because of it. Because running away was all my idea. Because it was my fault that we were lost in the depths of an unforgiving city with nowhere to go to, no retreat to relieve us.

She hugged me, knowing that I was just scared. Both of us were scared. Very frightened.

"I'm here," she said softly. "Don't worry..."

I don't understand what happened, really. I cannot, no matter how hard I try, wrap my mind around it. It doesn't make sense. Not now. Now with how every feeling I have is bumbling together all at once.

I know it happened, because I'm here now. I know four years have gone by since then. I know we've traveled far, and the news stations have stopped reporting us. I know that they've given up hope. I know that we nearly froze every winter. I know that we did our best to stay hidden and live throughout our perilous, rainy, painful, terrible, dream-shattering, heartbreaking journey. I know these things, at least.

I do not, however, know what to do now.

We had arrived in a town just a week ago after traveling along the side of a highway, finally relieved of the fear of being run over by finding a backroad to shuffle along on. The houses were small and delicate, their boards painted white, their windows shining with a crystallite hue. The yards were mowed perfectly. The flowers were colors spattered across the pavement. The cars were shiny and new.

It was a neighborhood.

We shambled down the street. Since the fight we had four years ago, we did not hold each other's hands, but we walked side by side. It didn't matter if anyone saw us. They wouldn't recognize us. They wouldn't know who we were by now. If anything, we looked like two kids taking a stroll down their avenue.

She saw something across the street. I don't know what it was, and I don't know why she started toward it. I don't know what she was going to say to me, because she was cut off. I don't know what she was thinking, and I never would again. I don't know why the black car was speeding down the street. I don't know why it was heading toward her so quickly.

I don't know why it hit her.

Since then, I don't know anything. I struggle to understand. I struggle to understand why I hold two lunchboxes instead of one, why I have two sweaters instead of one, why I have no person beside me instead of one. I struggle to understand why a little rural town outside the city is the most dangerous place I have ever been.

I struggle to understand why I sit beside this little smooth stone and hold lavender in my hand.

I can't carve. I don't have a pocketknife. I was never able to find one for my own self-defense. And she didn't have one, either. Our parents hadn't trusted us with knives as eight-year-olds, and they never gave any to us.

The little stone has a tiny marking on it. A circular letter, C, is drawn in thick black marker, the one marker I had saved in my lunchbox from the day we ran away. It won't stay forever, even though it says "permanent." I know it won't stay forever because she did not stay forever. I know it won't stay forever because "forever" cannot be a real thing.

I have lavender, too. Lavender was her favorite color. All I can do is tuck the stone and the flower into the nook of a tree's root and leave them there.

I've made it to the grasslands we once talked about. Those rolling hills of never-ending fields where clouds soar overhead, I have arrived at. I have claimed the dreams we once had.

I don't have a home.

I don't have a home to return to now that my perilous venture is over. I don't have a place of rest to come back to and flop down in bed. I have this little treeline, the scraps of food left in these lunchboxes, these two sweaters. I have myself and the air that I breathe. But I have no home.

Somewhere in these fields that go on and on, somewhere in this viridescent sea, must be a home. And I will search for that home. Because I need a home to return to.

I need a dream that is not fragile.

I need a friend who is not gone.