Runaway

When I was small I would crave the silence of the woods. Inside there was all the fighting. My parents with one another. My mother battling her demons. My brother telling my mother he would not go to school, would not do his homework, would not take the dog out.

I would sink into the silence of my room only to be jarred loose in the way voices and anger rattle the bones of a house and leave it shaking on the floor of oneself. I was the house and at the heart of me was a tiny, small girl who needed

To be

Still.

Outside of my window as a great, yawning darkness. The woods and the paths that had been made over years of trackers searching for animals. The scat left behind when animals hunted and the carcasses of living things that did not remain so for long.

Outside of my window was a whole world that felt at once, a touch away, and also – forbidden and forever far from me. I could reach it if only the shuddering, shaking walls of my home were not so very thick and made of anger. They prickled around me, as thick as any thorns on sleeping beauty’s castle.

It was in second grade that I began to have the thought that I would escape. Shimmy out my window and run, a slim figure in an endless night. I packed a few outfits. A water bottle. Some granola bars. I placed them all under my bed, and I ignored the cries of my mother as she looked for my clothing. As my farther searched for his bars. I hid in my bed with my flashlight and read the Secret Garden, and imagined that instead of Robin, I would have a great owl – a snowy owl, or a barn owl, that would sit high up in the trees and visit me. that would help me to feel less lonely out there in the middle of the nowhere where I would make my home. And blinking back tears, I switched off the flashlight, knowing this was the last night I would ever spend in the bed where I had spent my childhood.

It was the next day that I left, skipping school and going directly to the woods. My sunny afternoon becoming immediately twisty and dark. I walked paths, and traced lines in the dirt with a stick I found. There were so many places to go, so many ways through the underbrush.

But there was no ‘through’. There was no ‘getting there’ and I settled into a long night with flickering flashlight and words that dissolved behind my tears, not realizing it was only six in the evening. My stomach rumbled me awake a little later and I could hear the screech and hoot of an owl. Just as I had planned! I rubbed by eyes and picked up the book from where it had tumbled in the mulch and leaves. Shaking my head, I huddled deeper against the trees, trying to ignore the way the tree bit into my body and the cold ate at my energy.

The owl landed on the ground a few feet from me. Then hopped toward me. as though he too had just come from a cozy bedroom and was unused to the mulch and wetness, as though he wanted to come join me in my bedtime book and snack. I broke off a piece of bar and tossed it to him. He screeched at me.

“Very rude!” but I gave him more. Feeling that he might be my only friend. And the only one who could find my body if and when I died.

As I surely would, a miserable wretch like Mary in the Secret Garden, or like Rose in 8 Cousins, without the wealthy Uncle each had to save me.

“You will be my only friend,” I reached out a hand, but he darted away, pecking at the ground for a mouse no doubt, and I pulled it back in quickly, remembering what I’d heard about birds and bites and maybe baby birds dying if you touched them.

I felt tears springing to my eyes then, at the thought of that, and tossed the rest of the bar to the little owl, who I would have named “Fetch” but he left the rest of the bar and went off with his friends, so I was left without food or friend for the rest of the night.

It was true dark when I started to hear my name. and darker still that my mother came, and wrapped her arms around me, the prickly part of her nature quietly put to bed for a moment, and my father and brother with her, all so scared they could not help but be loving and kind.

“I will come back,” I said to them stoutly, as though I’d had a choice.

“But only if you stop all the yelling,”

And they looked at me, and at one another. And they didn’t laugh. But at that moment I could feel all the ways we’d been with one another, all the anger and the sadness and the pain, and I felt it fall away. I felt the beginnings of something – and I didn’t know what it was then – but it was forgiveness and love. My brother punched me in the arm – “If you ever want to go to the forest you dope, just tell me!” and he picked up my book, very carefully, and my stuffed owl, who I had named Fetch when I was just a baby, and carried it home for me as though it were an honor and not something he were forced to do.

Then my mother and father, who rarely talked, each took a side of me, and my father held me while my mother took my hand.

“Let’s go home,” and she sounded very tired. So I held her hand too.

And we went home.

While in the distance, the owl hooted its goodbye.

KLA

Kathryn Averyheart

#2022writingeveryday