Home
I first ran away home aged ten. I can’t really remember why now. That detail has been lost to my memory so many decades later, but I’m sure it was important at the time. My parents found me Sniveling, cold, and wet at a bus stop an hour from our house.
The second time was only two years later when I was ten. This time I remember why. Music lessons. I’d wanted to learn the saxophone, but my parents said it had to be the violin or glockenspiel, and neither of those really seemed that interesting to me. Even then I realised that was a stupid reason to run away. I think it was more to do with just feeling like my parents never listened to me. And really, with the benefit of hindsight, why should they have listened to a ten-year-old?
After that I stayed put for a little while. Until my parents divorced. It was messy, loud, drawn out, and inevitable. I don’t think me wanting to leave home during that was so strange really. It took two days for my Dad to find me. Somehow I convinced a lonely cafe owner to give me some work cleaning tables for a mangey bed and board. I was 14.
I went to live with my Mum for two years. She remarried. I gained siblings whose looks of lingering distant disdain slowly morphed into a tired tolerance. Mum kept a cosy home, but it felt claustrophic to me. Those walls of warmth squeezed and crushed me with an affection I wasn’t looking for.
You might think that with that record I would have left home for good as soon as I was legally allowed. But actually living alone again with my Dad was kind of OK. We mostly stayed out of each other’s way, and there was plenty of space. I actually didn’t leave the family home until I was 22. When I met that special someone who I knew I’d spend the rest of my life with.
We moved in together straight away. A new home.
I left three weeks later.
I turned right at the bottom of our small street, which led to the main road, and kept walking with no destination or aim in mind. People see me coming in their direction and go out of their way to avoid me, anticipating a homeless request for money or food. I haven’t lost a home. I have three to choose from. I don’t want one. I don’t think I ever really wanted one. It was more of a place I was expected to be by others.
Now I wander. I pick up odd jobs, somehow manage to find enough to eat and drink. I pass others like me on the streets, roads, and paths, and we throw each other barely discernible looks of knowing, of understanding.
The past two days I’ve been sitting under this tree. Staring out across the summer fields to the horizon. Watching the sun rise and set. I sigh, the warm air soaking into my skin.
Time to move on.
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