Inspiration

This was definitely one of those times I heard a song and I wanted to write something for it. I don’t really have other memory of this, lol.

Timeline

Other than just generally being set sometime in 2004, there really isn’t a lot of setup here. It’s during Elizabeth’s marriage to Ric, but after the birth of her child (who we didn’t know was a boy when I wrote it.) It’s kind of a foggy history story — it’s set in the GH world, but there’s nothing really tethering it to a time or place.

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Sooner or later she feels the morning come

She wakes up, a smile on her face. Her husband thinks it’s because he’s there and he smiles back at her.

But her smile—the light in her eyes is not for him. Not today.

He leaves for work with a kiss to her cheek and a cup of coffee. When his car has pulled out of the driveway, she spurs into action.

Isn’t it safer — dark thoughts all gone

Today is the day she makes her escape.

What a sensation

She packs as many of her daughter’s clothes as she can cram into three diaper bags and a suitcase. She tosses in the stuffed animals the baby can’t live without, formula—nearly everything the little girl owns.

She herself is only taking two suitcases and a few art supplies.

She has made it through one more tomorrow

She doesn’t bother leaving a note—doesn’t care enough to tell him that she’ll never come back. That she doesn’t love him.

That she’s almost sure she never did.

It’d been an illusion—a trick of light.

Raising up her eyes to a brand new sky

She will never be tricked again.

She knows the truth at last

She packs the car up, locks the door tightly and fastens her daughter into the car seat. The divorce papers that she’d tricked him into signing the week before have already been signed and filed.

He’d thought it was a form for the doctor’s office about the baby.

She’s never coming back

She wants to slam her foot on the pedal and never look back. But she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself so she drives the speed limit and follows every traffic law to the letter.

She’ll be gone
So many years

She arrives at the meeting point and sits on the hood of her car with her daughter in her arms. This is a safe place for her. It always has been. A hundred yards away sits an old dilapidated boxcar that isn’t visible to her but she can feel it sitting there.

She’ll be gone
Melting away

A lifetime ago, she found him bleeding in the snow like some sort of tragic snow angel. She’d picked him off the ground and forced him to live—to breathe.

And weeks ago, he’d found her crying in the snow. Her daughter is almost a year old, she has the house in the suburbs, the perfect husband—the life she should have wanted.

The life that suffocated her, trapped her.

He’d forced her to live—to breathe again.

She’ll be gone
This is the day

Her daughter stirs in her arms and starts to cry, confused by the strange surroundings.

She rocks her back to sleep. Hers eyes are trained on the road. Willing this not to be a cruel joke.

Someone is walking up to the bedroom door

In the fifteen months since her second marriage to the same man, she has become the trophy wife she’d sworn never to be. The pretty woman on his arm at social functions as he butters the wealthy up for reelection campaign funding. The doting wife who organizes dinners for his colleagues and always has his warmed in the oven when he works late.

Hearing him knocking
She knows what it’s for

He never asked her to make these changes but she felt the pressure to be perfect—to make his life perfect. It choked her and six weeks ago, it threatened to kill her.

But he’d found her crying in the clearing near the boxcar. He’d forced her to tell him what was wrong—forced her to treat him like the man she’d once thought she’d imagined.

She’s at the window wondering why there is no one to save her

And on that day, their plan to escape their lives had been borne.

Raising up her eyes to a brand new sky

Their respective lives that choked them, that trapped them—that changed who they were at the very core—

They would run away and never look back.

She knows the truth at last
she’s never coming back

Just as she thinks she might have imagined that day in the snow, she hears the rumble of the familiar bike.

He coasts the bike to a stop and approaches her. He takes the baby from his arms and cradles her in his own as if she were his.

She’ll be gone
So many years

“You’re late,” she tells him, teasingly.

“Traffic.” But he’s smiling too. Her daughter is awake now and she’s smiling, reaching her chubby fists for his leather jacket.

She’ll be gone
Melting away

“Ready to go?” she asks. He nods and although it pains him, he leaves the motorcycle where it’s parked. He has enough money to buy another and they need the car to get to the airport.

He’ll send for it one day, he tells himself. One day, he’ll tell his sister to send it to where they end up.

She’ll be gone
This is the day

She moves the car seat to the back and he fastens the little girl inside, making sure the straps are tight. He gives her a beaten up giraffe he’d hidden inside his jacket. He’d given it to another baby once upon a time—a little boy he’d loved as a son.

And now he was giving it to a little girl he’d raise as a daughter. After all—she had her mother’s blue eyes.

Raising up her eyes to a brand new sky
She knows the truth at last

Jason Morgan started the car and backed it back onto the road taking Elizabeth and Audrey Lansing away from Port Charles.

She’s never coming back