This week’s Friday Fiction is hosted by the talented Catrina Bradley over @ her blog, Speak to the Mountain. Click here to read and share more great fiction!

Author’s Ramblings: This is a short snippet of prompt fiction for the prompt “Run”. I’ve had wonderful writing weather today (which for me means lots of dark clouds, pouring rain and maybe a bit of thunder and lightening) and it may have made this piece a tad darker than I intended, but it’s meant to be open-ended as it is now. Please enjoy the read and thanks for stopping by!

Running. Running. Running. 
I can’t breathe. I cannot draw a single breath. There is fire ripping through every fiber of my body as it struggles to suck one desperate glip of air from the reality around me. I don’t know if I can breathe. I don’t know if I should.
I don’t know if I really want to.
Why does it have to hurt like this?
I just want to get away. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to feel this….pain.
Crushing, strangling, breaking.
It’s tearing me apart in ways that I don’t want to understand and the more I try to resist, the stronger this pull becomes. It is some twisted, delightfully fatal attraction. I can’t resist.
And I can’t breathe.
But my legs are moving, somehow, beneath me, they are moving, carrying me away from nowhere to somewhere. Taking me to a place where there should be air. A place where I can rest. A place where I should be able to rest.
Air is slipping away from me again.
Why does it take so much effort to do something so simple?
The heaving, gasping, choking breaths that are forcing their way through every tortured passage of my body, sustaining me for precious moments more, compelling me to live longer than the time I’ve set for myself.
I want to die.
For everything that I’ve been through and done, I don’t want to live. I’m so dark, dirty and filthy. Absolutely wretched, completely undeserving and nothing more than a miserable blot on the miniscule scrap of existence on this earth.
I want to die.
Yet I can’t.
I keep trying, but something refuses to let me go. It keeps on chasing me.
So I keep on running.
Living means running.
Running means living.
I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it. I want it go away. I want that darkness that is clutching at me with such torrid desperation to take me under. I want to surrender to those despicable claws, letting them rip me apart, shred me to pieces and then to leave me.
To leave me alone.
To be blissfully left to my own devices.
To finally give in to this utter hopelessness that has never crept further than a few inches away from my waiting gasps.
But He won’t let me.
I don’t understand.
It’s like I could never outrun Him.
Even if I could reach that painfully perfect moment of blackness where I could finally find the solitary solace I’m craving—somehow—I know He’d be there. I know He’d have followed me. I know that He’d be watching. That even though the shadows are there to hurt me, He’d still be the ray of whiteness betwixt them, holding back that final blow from crushing me.
I don’t get it.
The more I run from Him, the closer He seems to get.
I’m trying run with everything I have and yet, it is nothing to Him. He’s there anyway and it doesn’t seem as if it’s taken anything from Him to be there for me. To be there even when I don’t deserve it.
This desperation is like a poison with no antidote—I can feel it burning through me, eating up everything in its path and I run to hide the shame, the humiliation of this internal death, to appease the guilt that demands this cycle of self-torture. I am truly nothing.
Run.
Run!
Stop.
Stop…
Why can I hear His voice? Why is it so kind, so patient…so gentle? Why does it fill my head with things I shouldn’t dream of? I am nowhere near worthy, I am entirely undeserving of such tenderness and I am stained so dark that I cannot even tell this body apart from the shadows clinging to me.
But I can feel Him.
It hurts.
Light burning through darkness is beautiful—but it still hurts.
This kind of pure love hurts. It’s not a feeling. It isn’t a game. It isn’t something I was ready for. The sheer strength and beauty of His love is overwhelming, I can’t even begin to know how or where to accept it. It is the thing I desire, the thing I crave from deep inside.
His searing touch is a focal point, drawing my darkness out with infinite skill and patience. There is mercy in His eyes. There is hope in His smile. There is a promise of peace in His heartbeat.
The need to die is fading.
It takes something from me to give over this tortured heart, to trust Him to hold it, to have it, to know that it is His. It seems to take more than I can give, to hand it over to Him, when I know how easily He could crush it—but He doesn’t.
And it’s worth it.
I am battle-scarred from fighting solo, bruised from falling on my face because I thought I had no other choice, battered to unrecognizable and I am still, dark, dirty and filthy.
Stop.
Stop…shhh…
It’s changing.
I am in His arms and it hurts.
The kind of pain that brings shame to burn in my cheeks, but I know better now—I know I can’t hide it from Him.
Cradled in goodness, surrounded by warmth, sheltered by grace, precious things I am too delirious to reason through. If I deserve them or not, I don’t know, I just know that I want it. I want it so badly it hurts.
Tears are spilling out of me. I can’t hold them back.
I want to be free from this.
Death seemed like freedom—a temporary freedom.
Suddenly, I want Him. I need Him.
The strength pouring into me is coming from Him and with every shudder and twitch bringing me back to life, I reach for Him, I cling to Him. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to say it. But I want Him to understand.
I want Him to know I’ve chosen.
I’ve chosen Him.
His arms tighten around me.
I’m safe.
Loved.
Protected.
He cares.
I can’t stop crying.
I don’t want to. This kind of pain is painless as it burns through me, leaving nothing but soothing everything, the jagged, rawness inside is iced away to a blissful, blessed numbness. It is emptying the chaos in my head. It is coaxing me to live, to breathe, to function again. To give me a chance to come back to myself—in Him.
It’s working.
This twisted mind of mine is clearing. Through the fog I can see a glimmer of happiness, something akin to understanding. I’m so tired. I’ve been running and running and running and running until I couldn’t bear it any longer. But I can see something now.
I wasn’t running away.
I was running to Him.
Through this entire ordeal, every sordid detail, every painful protest, every ounce of resistance—just, everything—I felt it. I knew it. I just pretended I didn’t.
I can run.
I can always run.
But I know He’ll let me go—because when I’m running, I’m running to Him.
© Sara Harricharan