“Maybe he could borrow the boy’s peace just for a minute, just long enough for him to remember how to breathe again? He’d give the boy his peace right back. He didn’t want to steal it. He just wanted to share.” (page 147)

Upon April’s first breath, Day Eleven arrives. Welcome.

Peace is a wondrous gift. A brief, fleeting moment of peace can see you through years of hell.

It is a mouthful of cool, refreshing water in the middle of a desert…And often souls crippled from mental illness die from the very thirst for it.

Parched for that lull in the madness, desperate for that heartbeat of calm, we ache for just a single drop of that water.

For twenty years now I’ve battled a chronic panic disorder.

I have found peace only once.

It lasted three innings.

A Chicago Cubs fan since the age of ten, I had always dreamed of a trip to Wrigley Field, a baseball mecca for many die-hard fans. It had held the top spot on my “Must do” list for decades.

I got there once.

I sat down in that seat on the first base side of Wrigley Field just as Wayne Messmer finished singing the national anthem.

Peace found me at that moment.

Surrounded by thirty thousand rabid Cubs supporters and with my sister by my side, for those first three innings all the parts of my mind that are constantly warring with each other, well, they all simply went still.

It’s silly, I suppose. I know I can’t explain it.

It was as if God bent down and gave me a peek of heaven… a heaven where I am normal, where my nervousness is not only gone, it never even existed.

By the fourth inning, the peace had slipped away and I’ve never known it since.

But I can still taste that water in my mouth.

Until tomorrow…

Chloe Stowe