The cloud cover is low and flat and white, like an old bed sheet stretched tight over the mountains.

My sleepless night presses on my eyeballs like two thumbs, but I know there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep with the jostling roll of the bus.

I haven’t been deep into the mountains since the Christmas before last. The pine trees look black under their coats of snow, and crowd up to the highway like skeletal soldiers. I feel like they’re watching me as we rattle down the muddy highway. The mountains are so bleak and colourless that the occasional school-bus yellow road sign bursts into my vision like a firework.

~

I unbind my hair, and let it curl over my shoulder in a single thick ring. Nobody has seen my shorter coloured hair, nobody here knew I’d done it.

Quitting social media has felt so good. My life is more my own than ever before.

“What prompted this?” my friend asks, gently probing. The gentleness of her question pisses me off instantly, though I’m aware the feeling isn’t fair, so I stamp it down.

I shrug. “I felt like it. I’m an adult, and the best part of being an adult is doing things just because I like them.”

~

My old lover comes to town and takes me to lunch. I am aware he specifically carved out a couple hours for me, and I’m grateful for the effort.

I eat slowly, because I am distracted by the thought of clamping my thighs over his dimples.

~

With no warning, we burst through the cloud cover.

The sky is delicate and blue, like the shell of a robin’s egg. The sun is cold and white and bright, but makes the rolling mountains look majestic instead of ominous. A bird of prey loops in the distance, big dark wings flashing like a shadow on the sparkling snow.

It is amazing, in the true sense of the word. I watch it go by with my face pressed to the bus window.

~

The thrift store is a perfect small town thrift store. I love this one. Shelves and racks of random kitchen ware, old 70’s couches in lurid colours, a few cases for the nicer stuff (“Of course they’re not locked! We’re not in the CITY!”).

I’m waiting for my mom.

Strolling the aisles, a few odds and ends tucked under my arm, and then—-

Holy shit.

Everyone needs a hobby, and mine currently is vintage kitchen ware.

And I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

I pick up the smaller Pyrex bowl and flip it over to check the pattern.

It’s one of the holy grails, one of the rarest and most expensive.

It looks like it’s never been used.

The bigger bowl is there, the matching set from 1958. A promotion, only from that year. Both bowls are there. Both bowls are *perfect*.

I can hardly contain myself.

I flip them over again to see the price. $8. They have no idea what they have. This set together is easily worth twenty times as much.

I grab a cart and load them in, just in time for my mom to show up.

She has no idea why I’m so excited, but she’s excited for me anyway.

She makes me explain to her friends my ‘cool find’. It’s weirdly wholesome, and it makes me glad I came.

~

My luggage and dad in the back. My mom driving, me in the passenger side.

“Where are you going?” my dad says as my mom hesitates, scanning for parking.

“He always DOES this,” she snaps, shaking her head in that exact way when her temper is getting close to the snapping point. My stress goes from a baseline to 11 almost immediately. I feel sick to my stomach, and I very carefully don’t make eye contact. “He asks me to drive and then he tells me what to DO.”

I want out, I want to be gone, I want nothing more than to be on that wobbling bus heading back to my house and my room. My safe place where no one is allowed to enter.

~

I can see the cloud cover before we hit it.

We plunge into the white wall like a whale coming down from a breach.

In another minute or two we are back on that bleak colourless road, the black pines lined up in formation along the ditches.

They don’t look quite as bleak as they did though. They are just trees now. I can still see the sun, milky and distant through the clouds.

Before&After