Run, Baby, Run

I come from a family of runners. When things got bad, too hard, bill collectors started to catch up, we moved. We moved a lot when I was a kid.

And when my mother decided to leave, she did it in the dark of night with only what she could fit in the car and my brothers. No note, no explanation, just gone.

My sister threw all of her things out of her bedroom window and then walked out of the front door to go on a date. She never came back.

When I was younger, I used to think that it was such cowardice. How can you just run instead of taking responsibility, instead of standing up for yourself, instead of owning that this was your life, part of your own making?

I feel that pull now, now that everything is chaos. I feel the need to pack up the car, the kid and disappear. I feel like I am crawling out of my skin, just sitting here waiting. Waiting for what?

In the still and the silence of the sleeping house after everyone has fallen asleep, I think I could do it, I think I could just get in the car and drive, just be gone. There is nothing keeping me here.

To what?

That’s the question that haunts me, that unknown. I am too much of a control freak to not know where the next meal is going to come from, too many questionable factors weighing me down. What happens when the real world catches up to me again, when there is nowhere else left to run? What then? What happens when the Supergirl realizes what I have done and begs to go back to her home, the only home that she has ever known, the home that she was conceived in?

So, I stay, in this mess that I have partially created. And I wait.