Note on the Front Gate

Dear Corey,

Please come home. Whatever you did today is something we can talk about. You are my son and I love you. No one has asked you to leave. Everything has been going so well, so I know we can work this out. We've certainly been through tougher, although nothing would be tougher than having you leave.


Please come home.
Please call.


Mom
PS Of course the door will stay open for you.

Yeah. It was a rough one yesterday. He is home. We are "okay." Although I have heard him explain why he left, I do not understand it at all. But that goes both ways, I guess. While he heard me explain why taking a walk during the day instead of doing homework was not great, but not at all comparable to leaving in the middle of the night and running around town, banging on people's doors because he thought he was being followed by gang members... I don't think he sees the difference.


I have not gotten a promise that he won't just leave again. I don't suppose I would believe it anyway.


Of all the thoughts that floated and ran and paced through my brain yesterday, the primary three were:

• Will he go up to the mountains like he had planned to last time?
• How he handle the cold? It's supposed to be in the 20's to 30's here tonight... How much colder will it be at a higher elevation?
• Will I ever see him again?

And then, because my mind goes to all the weird places, I also wondered this:

• If we get the house, are we supposed to move if he's not home by then? He knows how to get to Grammy's house, but what if something happens to her and he has no way to reach us again... ever? Should we just stay here until we know where he's at?

The only question out of all of these that I have an answer to is the third one from up above. I finally saw him again around 4:00 yesterday afternoon. It had only been six hours since I'd last seen him, and four hours since I knew he was gone. There has never been a longer four hours in my life.
It turns out that knowing your child has run away doesn't bring any comfort. Not like you thought it would, right? But if you had to think about your child running away versus being kidnapped, maybe you'd tell yourself "at least I'd know he/she left of their own will" or "at least they're not under anybody else's control." But the truth is, you only know they were safe when they left. You have no idea how things went once they walked down the street. There's no way to know which way they headed.
There is no comfort.