They say she runs. That she always has.
Not literally, but emotionally and spiritually, in the quiet way people do when they feel a storm approaching. She runs at the first tremor of instability, at the first cracks of the walls that she’s built and hides behind. She’s the girl who leaves before the ending finds her. It’s somewhat of a hobby for her, turning self-preservation into an art form.
So she laughed it off; every word that slashed her heart into pieces was now a part of her joke. She nicknamed herself ‘the bolter’
It wasn’t cruel, not exactly. More like a title given with a sigh: a mix of self-realisation and fatigue. She said it with a kind of admiration, too, because she always left in a hauntingly beautiful way. Just a disappearance, a lingering faint perfume of what could have been.
But behind the grace of her exits lies something quieter: fear dressed as control.
She runs because staying feels like surrender. The idea of someone knowing her, really truly knowing her, is way more terrifying than being alone. There’s safety in being the one who leaves. You can’t be abandoned if you’re already gone.
The people in her life saw an outer perspective to it; they laughed at her self-degrading jokes and the way she twisted her hurt into poems or comedy.
But no one asked what it’s like to live like that, to always be the ghost of your own story. Because being ‘the bolter’ is never glamorous, it’s exhausting.
Every time she leaves, she builds a new version of herself. A version that the one she runs away from will never know existed. She repaints her walls a different shade, bolder and darker. Reinvention is her routine. She changes with the flow of the wind and erases the traces of the scratched chapters from her book.
And yet there’s a thrill to it. The rush of escape. The idea that you can always transform into someone they never even knew. The bolter doesn’t wait for things to end; she ends them herself. That’s her pill of pain. The illusion of control, the sweet ache of choosing her heartbreak.
So she keeps moving. Always almost arriving, never quite unpacking.
Sometimes she calls it healing. Sometimes she calls it independence. But in her quieter moments, when the world feels too still, she wonders if it’s just fear in shiny packaging.
She peruses through the old, forgotten versions that existed and almost misses them. She tells herself she leaves to protect her light, but what if the light only survives through staying? Maybe that’s the hardest truth of all, that love and stability were never cages, they were just mirrors; and that running doesn’t make you untouchable, it just makes you lonely in the brightest rooms.
Sometimes she meets people who act like the anchors to her free-flowing ship. They tell her to slow down, to stay, to stop disappearing the moment it starts feeling too real. They offer promises, laughter, and warmth. That’s the issue. She’s learned not to trust things that ask her to pause or ask her to stay. Every time she has stayed something cracked- the fantasy, the truth, the version of her that believes things could be easy for that one time. So she leaves again.
But even the most beautiful masks can fall apart, and even the most practised escape artist gets tired.
There comes a day when the thrill fades, and the quiet after leaving, which once felt peaceful, now aches her bones with emptiness. She wonders what it would really feel like to stay, not because it’s ‘safe’, but because it’s real. To be known and not run. To be loved and not flinch.
But old habits are hard to unlearn.
She catches herself drafting exits even from things that don’t hurt yet. She softens her laughter when people get too close, changes subjects when the conversation turns personal, and her wounds suddenly start feeling fresh again. She calls it instinct, but it’s really defense. Because if she can control when it ends, maybe it won’t end her.
Maybe one day, someone will see through it, the calm tone, the ‘maintained’ composure, the casual detachment, the jokes about commitment. Maybe they’ll see that every step is a plea for safety. But until then, she remains the bolter. The one who leaves before anyone notices that she’s scared. The one who calls it freedom because it sounds way shinier than fear.
And maybe- just maybe, she’ll one day realise that not every door has to be a threshold to escape and that sometimes staying isn’t surrender. Sometimes it’s courage.
The day she learns that, the day she lets herself stay without calculating the exit, maybe the name will finally fade.
Maybe she won’t be “the bolter” anymore.
Just a girl who finally stopped running.
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