He sat there sniffling on the sidewalk in front of our house.

His long and bold journey away from the pain and torment of home was only the length of our driveway. It must have seemed like a hundred miles to him, though.

He was “running away.”

His stride probably wobbled with the weight of his feelings after so many steps, I’m sure he’d lost count of how many. As much as I’m sure he was actually counting each of them. He’s equipped with a six-year-old’s short and fast, yo-yo attention span, so these things are very probable.

The ambition of the distance was clearly overthrown by a growing anxiety about how an all-out, desperate search party would find him if he went too far, or how he’d ever find his way own back if he couldn’t stand waiting for his rescuers.

Five minutes earlier (five days in his mind), he’d yelled at his mom. When she filled me in later, she couldn’t recall the words he’d hurled at her, or what it was even about, really. But he’d been having a grouchy day and she’d had her fill, so she just walked away from his last outburst. To him, on that day, this obviously meant he was the biggest pile of human garbage that ever existed ever and forever ever.

His lower lip might have trembled as the avalanche of guilt and regret consumed him and sent his anguished mind to the dark thoughts of self-inflicted banishment, dramatic visions of making amends by protecting us from his complete and utter horribleness by running away. So…

Five minutes later, I walked up to him sulking on the sidewalk, completely unaware of what had just happened, and asked him what was up. He tucked his little legs up closer to his chest as if bracing himself against the miserable blizzard of his internal winter. He moaned:

I hid my amusement behind a serious face, he was just so adorably sorry and pathetic. I suggested he go say sorry and give her a big long hug, adding the encouragement that I was confident that would handle it all straight away.

Hope dawned eagerly on his teary face, he was probably incredibly bored of being sad by then, and his little legs flew above the lawn as he zoomed like a mom-seeking missile to find his target.

Later that night, when she was straightening up his room for bedtime, she found his runaway note. We shared one of those melted-heart awwwws when she showed it to me, because we’d had no idea he was even running away, he’d done such a terrible job of it. To us, it just seemed like he was upset about what he’d done, and we’d completely missed the fact that the world was ending, for him.

The emotional paper cuts we experience with others can feel like the fatal fall of a guillotine with the ones we love the most. Especially when you’re six.
 

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