I am home and well. Thanks for thinking of me.

It will still be a little bit, I'm afraid, until I start replying. I'm not quite up to writing yet, but here is a scrap of fiction I wrote for a different corner of the internet a while ago. It was done for a few authors putting together different types of art dedicated to the concept of "having left", physically, mentally, emotionally, otherwise or all of the above; and it reminded itself to me as it may be used in something similar again soon.
- - -
I left because the blue sky broke my soul.
He knocked for fifteen minutes. The first one of them startled through me like thunder. Adrenaline drenched my limbs and I was queasy before even realizing what was happening on my apartment doorstop, what had to come to call on me and why. All of my hours were piled up in that apartment, hung with exquisite care from nails I hammered in myself.
Maybe I'd called in help from a neighbor a time or two.
He knew and I knew that the door wasn't going to be opened from the inside. My car was in its slot and I was standing in the doorway between the living room and my bedroom, watching the door quiver beneath his fist and eyeballing the blinds as if I didn't already know they were closed. He couldn't see in. He couldn't see me.
He didn't have to. He had a key.
Fortunately, I remembered this before he used it. I stepped backwards, barefoot and stealth, into the bedroom and kept walking that way until I could crawl into the bed, right up to the pillows, and slowly pull the thick down comforter over me. I curled up as small as I could make myself and stuffed a few pillows strategically around me, thinking they could be camoflage even as I heard the deadbolt click and scrape. I started holding my breath by the time the apartment door creaked open, one eye peering through a needle thin part in the blankets at my bedroom window. I could see half his car, and the rest was sky.
He was very quiet, going through my life. A desperate, cold quiet that locked you down more than it did him. He walked and sighed loud enough for me to listen to and I squeezed shut my eyes when the doorknob turned, blotting out the window. He must have stood there in the doorway for an eternity. To this day, I don't know if he recognized my so-called strategic in bed hiding for what it was, believed me dead and not sleeping, or honestly didn't actually see me where was I was lying there. Quite frankly, by then I might have been stunned if he had.
Regardless, he left. The door was closed behind him, and the apartment door behind that. He even locked it back again from the outside. I listened to all of this and eventually opened my eyes again when his engine turned over. It was an October. The sky was the color of hydrangeas in iron rich soil and I dissolved beneath one small and jagged piece of its beauty. I left then, stepped right out of myself, and I only came back to pack.