"Let go or be dragged" - Zen Proverb

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The clock is racing past me when I drop my glasses in the middle of the hallway. The bell rings and everyone is rushing to their cars. I lose footing, and I find myself on the ground.

"Kale, you alright?" A girl in passing calls from across the hall. I can hear Brad asking why I am on the floor. He lives up the street from me, and we have known each other since the third grade. The chatters become echoes and all I hear are people asking if I am alright, racing to their cars. Ryan, Sarah Elizabeth, Beth, Kaiser. They all left.

I throw my hand up to show that I'm fine. Someone must've stepped on the glasses because my hand slid across a piece on the floor and I could feel the blood wet my hands. I was thinking about how Shawn did not come to school, how skipping track practice to go to Northpark for Shawn would be a good idea. I'd done the same run on the mountains. My vision locks so I can't see anything but the pattern of my brother's shoes coming towards me, in a skewed pattern the flow of blackness centers in my eye.

"Why do you keep losing these glasses?"

I chuckle because he is a funny man and we don't interact with something, potentially catastrophic happens, "sometimes I think you can move in the dark."

He grabs my hand, and I am off the floor and following him out the school door. He is younger than me but sometimes I think he knows more than me, he moves through the world with an open eye.

"You just happened to be walking on the senior side of the school?" I asked to joke with him. There is no division at this school, Jeremy could walk over here all the time, in passing and I'd probably never see him go by. He has Physics.

"I just happened to hear the glass shatter from class and I knew it was my clumsy brother and mom wouldn't let me in the yard if I ignored you and left you hanging without some direction."

Without my glasses, I can't drive to Northpark, so I text Shawn. The blur intensifies with the glare of the sun. The walk to the car is longer this time. I can feel everyone, even Shannon staring at my arm cuffed with my brothers as he escorts me to the car. Jeremy is my "nerdy" brother who no one gets to see.

"Don't drive me off a cliff," I tell him as we speed backward out of the parking space.

We are not far from the school when I remind him where Northpark is. "I'm not taking you to Shawn's house," he yells before making an abrupt stop. Stop signs, eight of them before we get home.

"She didn't come to school."

"You're so obsessive you gotta stop that man."

"She's my girlfriend. I love her."

"Yeah, but what y'all are doing. All this running around and stressing is not good for you or her."

I want him to say I was dying because I am and so is he.

"She knows your condition," the car swings left.

I want to ask him what my condition really was and how it was different from his. I want Jeremy to say his brother has cancer, a tumor swallowing my eye and moving towards my brain. He's never said it.

There's a pause between us, and I want to say Shawn has a condition but I can't find the right way where it doesn't sound insensitive. That Shawn is addicted to drugs. That she is a recovering addict of cocaine. That thinking about her is making my eyes blur.