Some say that springtime is the beginning of life, and that winter signifies death and I don't know how I feel about that. It was somewhere between winter and spring where I found him and all I know is that death began my life, or something like that.

It's sometimes funny how life works, how one day you can have two parents that spend practically twenty-four hours a day with you, and the next they can be gone. To explain my situation, let me start with how my parents met. A long time ago my parents were in a group home together, an orphanage. They met when they were seventeen and fell in love. Both of their parents had died when they were a young age. My father went straight to a home for boys, but my mother was bounced around for a while, going from one elderly relative to another.

They were married the day my mother turned eighteen. My father had been eighteen for six months by then and had rented a modest apartment. My mother had a trust set up for her from the life insurance her parents had and so eventually they bought a small gas station and lived in the small apartment over it. My childhood was one of happiness, of joy. My parents doted on me, as both of them had always wanted to have a family. I would have had a dozen more brothers and sisters, if my mother had been able to have them. Unfortunately, complications during my birth made my mother incapable of having any more children.

They died when I was fifteen, victims of a drunk driver. They were coming home from my first varsity basketball game. I was on the bus. "No exceptions." Coach Reynolds was very strict about the rules he set. If you didn't come to practice, you didn't play in the game. And everyone rode home on the bus, win or lose, there was always something to talk about. We were detoured away from the accident site, making for a tense ride. No one was terribly surprised to find the state troopers waiting for the bus. And honestly, I wasn't terribly surprised to find them looking for me. Ever since I was a little girl, I'd had terrible nightmares about losing my parents. I've always attributed them to the fact that I didn't really have anyone else. No other relatives. Just a few close friends of my parents, the McHenry's. My parents had known them quite a long time, as they lived pretty close to the shop. I had grown up with their son Patrick. He was my best friend. That's where they took me that night. That's where I will live.

The next morning at the sign of first light, even as cold as it was, I started running. It was the best thing I ever did. My running was spiritual. A communication with myself. Running gave me back my life. Unfortunately, it reintroduced me to death as well.

A/N please read and review.