I Walk Alone

Date: 10/28/2025

I wake to my daughter’s voice drifting through the morning air — loud, exaggerated, bright with that wild joy only children seem to carry. She sounds almost drunk. Drunk on life, maybe. My watch reads 5:45 a.m. Damn clock changes. My body feels caught between worlds — too awake for night, too heavy for morning. Sleep has left me for good, so I let it go. I wander to the window and part the curtain just enough to see through. A woman sits on the low wall outside. It isn’t Phoebe — and yet it’s her voice. That unmistakable sound, alive and full of light, echoing through the stillness. She looks up and catches me watching. For a heartbeat our eyes meet. Then I step back, hiding like I’ve done something wrong. Embarrassed. Annoyed. Why must she be so loud at this hour, so impossibly alive when the rest of us are still half here? Downstairs, the house feels heavier than before. I flick on the lamp, and there’s Mum — folded in on herself on the sofa, shoulders curved inward as if she’s holding up a sky too heavy to bear. Her eyes stare into the void. I want to reach her, to say something that might lift her, but I already know how useless words can be. Depression builds its own walls, and no amount of love can climb them. So I sit beside her. We breathe the same still air. The clock ticks — steady, indifferent. The sound feels louder than it should, marking time we don’t know how to fill. After a while, I say quietly, “I’m going for a walk.” I hope she’ll come. But she only folds her face into her hands. And that’s answer enough. Outside, the cold greets me like an old friend. The air smells of damp earth and woodsmoke. The sun is still low, pouring through the trees in long, forgiving beams. A blanket of leaves covers the street — gold, copper, crimson. They crunch beneath my boots, soft but certain, like the sound of something ending. Each step feels like pressing into time itself — layers of what was once alive. Above me, the trees stand stripped bare, their branches reaching upwards as if still hoping for something. There’s honesty in their emptiness — a quiet kind of courage in letting go. The wind stirs, and the leaves rise — dancing across the road in sudden bursts of motion, broken things still wanting to be alive. Something in me stirs with them — that quiet ache of loving someone you can’t save, of watching light fade behind familiar eyes. And then, softly, the Green Day lyric hums its way through my head: I walk alone. I walk alone. I whistle the tune, letting it drift into the morning. The sound wavers, carried by the wind, lost among the trees. Then I start to run — through the leaves, through the sunlight, through the ache. I kick them high, watch them scatter, tumble, rain down in flickers of gold. For a moment, I forget everything. The heaviness. The silence. The helplessness. It’s just me and the wind. Me and the dance of what’s been lost. When I stop, the leaves settle quietly around my feet — a thousand small goodbyes. The street is still again. The trees stand bare, stripped of everything, yet somehow full of light. And I realise: maybe this is what it means to keep going. To shed, again and again. To walk alone. And still find beauty in the breaking.