"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze."
Isaiah 43:2

I could smell sweat and gasoline, the road whirring out under the tires. My hometown was blurring past, every street and store I knew like the back of my hand, how different they looked at twenty over the speed limit. Pressing my foot into the gas pedal, I heard the old engine groan in reply as the wheels sped up even more. How fast I was going, I didn't know. The speedometer in the car didn't work very well, along with the radio and the air-conditioning, both of which we had attempted to replace at least twice before finding we didn't have the money.

Blond strands of my hair were in my face and the wind was in my mouth. The wind tasted like metal and salt. It was mixing with the blood on my lip from where he had slapped me, his ring slicing the papery flesh like an X-Acto knife. Hair flew into the cut- aggravating it, preventing it from scabbing. It had been almost thirty minutes, but the blood wouldn't stop.

I kept hearing his voice in my head telling me to turn around, go back to the tiny apartment that we shared on Gray Street. I was making a big deal of it by running away, when it wasn't a big deal. It never was. He would tell me he was sorry, and I might just end up saying it too depending on how sad his eyes looked. And then we would clean up the mess together like we always did before renting a movie, something I'd been wanting to see because it's all about me, he would say. It was always "all about me" just after he'd hurt me, when suddenly out of no where, what I wanted mattered so much to him.

This voice I was hearing was not the voice that called me stupid and worthless as he punched me over and over. It was the other voice; the sweet voice that told me I was the girl I'd always wanted to be. . . the girl he drew in his sketchbook when I wasn't watching. . . pretty, bent over flowers soaked in sunshine with just a shadow of a smile on her lips, like the Mona Lisa. She was the girl I believed he could create and the one that I had been staying around for all these months. Everything was possible with that girl. Even something like love.

I held my finger to my mouth and felt sticky wet warmth pooling beneath my lower lip. I sucked the blood back into my throat before it could dribble down my chin. It hurt so much. Everything did. Now that I had left and could think, the numbness had worn off as I realized that this had actually happened; he had really done this to me.

In his band he sometimes played covers of songs everyone knew, and that's what this night was. A cover. It was an unfamiliar voice, a new guitar riff or two, but those very same unaltered lyrics leading you back anyway, a common ground. It always took people a few seconds to realize that they already knew how to sing along, because the core of the song was something they had already heard. In the same way, my life, this, had all happened before: his eyes black as the pavement I could hear under the tires, the tar bubbling in the Georgia sun. When we went to the shows and I watched him play, the core of those songs had been the lyrics. But the core of my life was Nathan.