Runaway
The surreal nature of my situation hasn't fully hit me until now, sitting here watching my face flash across the screen while holding my daughter as my stomach sinks to the bottom of my feet and my heart starts to race. "She is wanted for kidnapping". As I hear the wanna-be doctor egg man mouth those life-changing five-word phrases on the screen of our nighttime news, I freeze and grip my daughter tighter as she stands up in my lap. I slowly turn left towards my grandfather as the same shock on my face is reflected on his. As cliche as it may sound, time slowed, and my awareness shrunk to just me and the little girl I was gripping softly. The little girl my world evolved around was suddenly on national TV in clear technicolour. Pictures that were privately, or so I thought, on Facebook was flashing in PowerPoint fashion all over the television screen. The fear I was projecting had just caught ahold of my daughter as the one-year-old started to cry. Balancing on my knees, she turned around and put her chubby little arms around my neck and laid her head on my shoulder. As I felt her breath on my neck, my arms tightened around her like I wanted to protect her from what was happening, and I felt the warm tears hit my arms. I lifted my right hand to my face and touched my wet face, and looked at the glistening wet on my fingers, and time sped back up. It was at this moment, I knew my life, as hard as it had been up to this point, had just become even harder, and I was going to lose her.
