Where the Wind Waited

Where the Wind Waited

Scarlett's alarm cracked the pre-dawn silence. A muted sky glowed a pale blue, the first notes of morning bleeding through the slats of her blinds. The world was still asleep; the city still tucked itself beneath thin quilts of mist. Scarlett moved like she always did—efficient, practiced—lacing her shoes with mechanical precision, brushing her hair until it lay flat, her skirt ironed into stiff submission.

She grabbed her keys without thinking. It was Tuesday. It was supposed to be Tuesday.

The click of the lock behind her was final, but she didn't know it yet. Her car, an aging silver sedan, coughed to life. She pulled into the street, intending to make the usual right turn toward the office. She didn't. Her hands—or maybe it was her heart—turned the wheel left.

And she kept going.

The city gave way to sparse trees. The mist thickened, swallowing the road, leaving only a narrow ribbon of asphalt ahead. Scarlett didn't check her phone, didn't answer the dinging emails that began at 6:02 a.m. sharp. For once, she didn't care about the Teams messages, the meeting reminders stacking up like heavy stones.

She just drove.

Back in the Office

When Julie arrived, the first thing she noticed was darkness. The lights in the east wing, normally blazing by 5:45 a.m., were dead. Scarlett's lights. Her desk, visible through the glass, sat vacant. Her chair still tucked in.

"Maybe she's sick," someone muttered in the breakroom. But Scarlett didn't get sick. She was as consistent as the tides, as certain as the grind of the elevator up twenty-four floors.

First came the texts—"You ok?"—then the calls. Then someone realized her location wasn't shared anymore. Not paused. Not turned off. Just...gone.

Julie chewed her lip until it bled. Something was wrong.

Scarlett's Journey

Scarlett rolled down the window. Air, cool and edged with salt, kissed her skin. She felt the earth breathe—deep, slow, patient—in a way she never had in all her careful, ordered life.

Colors thickened. The greens were greener, the sky a bruised navy above blinding white mist. The asphalt faded to dirt. Still she drove, heartbeat slowing, matching the cadence of unseen tides.

Hours bled together. She ate gas station granola bars, drank watery coffee, and stared at the endless thread of road like it might stitch her back together.

Back Home

Scarlett's roommates were the first to panic.

"She was home late last night, right?" Skye asked, voice tight.

"Yeah," Mark answered. "She—I mean, I think so."

Her room was neat, nothing out of place. Her bag gone. Her sketchbook gone.

Skye found Scarlett's favorite coffee mug still in the sink, lipstick stain untouched. It made her chest ache.

By afternoon, the first missing persons report was filed.

Scarlett's Awakening

By the time she crossed into Maine, the world dissolved into a tapestry of color and breath. Scarlett pulled onto a dirt road that seemed stitched together by grass and memory, tires crunching into the soft earth. She left the keys in the ignition and wandered barefoot into the open arms of the land.

The ground was alive beneath her.

The sky spun slowly overhead, streaked with purple and silver, a cathedral of clouds.

The cliffs before her weren't cliffs at all, but long, sighing edges where the world let go. The sea stitched silver ribbons across the horizon, whispering promises in a tongue only the forgotten could understand.

There was no grid here. No neat rows of cubicles, no urgent red deadlines blinking like bombs.

Here, colors bled and brawled across the sky. The mist wasn't gray—it was lavender and honey and bruised lilac. She took out her battered sketchbook. Her fingers, stiff from disuse, trembled as she opened the watercolors, she'd tucked into her bag out of some desperate, half-forgotten hope. The pages almost lifted themselves, caught by the mischievous fingers of the wind.

She painted.

Without thinking. Without rules.

Wild ferns tangled into goldthread spires. The ocean breathed in a thousand shades of blue. She painted suns that wept yellow joy and trees that grew sideways, laughing into the gale. Structures bent, melted, danced; nothing stayed in its right place because here there was no right place.

The colors stained her fingers, her arms, her dress—until she looked less like a person and more like a canvas herself, half-forgotten and half-born.

Time thinned. She couldn't tell if it was minutes or years.

The wind howled approval, snatching her sketches and carrying them over the cliffs. She laughed, loud and raw and real, a sound she barely recognized as her own.

Scarlett had no map, no clock, no tether anymore.

Only the endless rush of color, the salt-stitched air, and the certainty—deep in her bones—that for the first time in her life, she wasn't lost.

She was free.

Back at the Office

The search intensified.

"She's a creature of habit," Julie told the officer. "She doesn't—she would never just leave."

Except Scarlett had.

Emails piled up. Deadlines frayed. The steady machine that Scarlett had fueled with her life sputtered without her.

Some coworkers cursed her under their breath. Others whispered fears they never voiced: that maybe she'd cracked, that maybe they all would someday.

Julie sat alone in the breakroom after hours, staring at the empty chair across the table.

"I'm sorry," she whispered into the fluorescent hum.

Scarlett's Collapse

It happened fast.

One moment she was alive—drinking color, breathing mist—and the next she was crumpled on the roadside, a figure small and broken beneath the endless sky.

A kind stranger found her, called for help. Paramedics carried her away.

Her sketchbook, vibrant and wild, was thrown unceremoniously into a plain cardboard box.

Scarlett floated between worlds.

In the Hospital

They said she was dehydrated, exhausted. That stress could unmake a person from the inside out.

Scarlett heard their words like distant thunder, felt them brush past her skin without sinking in.

Beyond the window, the world softened into a watercolor wash — all blues and bruised purples, stitched with gold.

Her hands itched for a brush. For a road. For something she hadn’t yet named.

They told her she could go home soon.

She smiled, but not in agreement.

Somewhere, her sketchbook waited, pages breathing beneath the weight of silence.

Somewhere, the wind still remembered her name.

Scarlett closed her eyes, feeling the pull—not backward, not forward, but elsewhere.

Maybe she would return.

Maybe she would build a new life out of salt and sky.

Or maybe, quietly, she had already left.

The morning light curled through the window, waiting.

And Scarlett simply let it.