A few nights ago I was seized with an intolerable and completely unbearable need to escape. My apartment’s the sort of place where you can stretch out your arms and touch both walls, and that sometimes leads to me behaving like a poorly-cared-for zoo animal.
So, I left.
I’ve been restless and wrong lately, filled with all sorts of indescribable feelings and that human urge to drop everything, vanish, and reappear twenty years later in a different state with a different, well, everything.
Maybe I was suited for the 1800s, because it seems like people did that kind of thing a lot back then. That’s what my coworker said her great-something grandpa did. Just up and left, and no one ever found him again.
Nowadays, disappearing takes too much effort, that’s for sure. What a trial! You’d have to burn your fingerprints off, get rid of all of your internet interactions (goodbye, molten record!), make sure you aren’t being tracked in some way, make sure no one knows you’re going, and make sure you don’t get caught by one of the billions of security cameras that keep a watchful buzzing eye over every little street corner.
Heck, that’s too much work. Besides, it’s probably not as fun as it sounds. I couldn’t disappear unless I was taking my whole family with me, and I don’t think they’d want that. That’s really not my point, anyway. The point is that I decided to gently indulge in my need to escape in a much more normal way, for a temporary little journey.
So, like I said before my tangent, I left.
I ended up at some tennis courts, well after dark, pointedly ignoring three “no trespassing” signs. Then I just lay down.
My initial plan had been to go out and try and spot the northern lights, because they were apparently visible that night. (I didn’t see them.)
When did the northern lights in Utah become a thing, anyway? I’ve seen them a few times now. Is that allowed? Is this some climate change-induced phenomena that no one told me about, or was I just somehow convinced that when they’re called the Northern Lights, they stay in the North, and not the wild west?
I was lying down on the tennis courts, looking up at a shocking variety of stars for such a light-polluted area. I let the cold of the concrete greedily siphon the warmth away, and I let myself lie there until the shivers of the 20-degree evening were more unbearable than the thought of being trapped in my apartment.
I sat and watched a satellite move overhead, and listened to the wind, and felt my hair shift under my head where it was unsuccessfully cushioning my skull from dead leaves and old paint.
Okay, I thought. That was kind of it. Okay.
I was a runner as a kid. At recess in first grade I used to go to the back of the field, wriggle under a chainlink fence, and go sit amongst the horses and cows that lived there in the orchard. I only got caught because I once cut my back on the fence on my way out, and my teacher saw me bleeding through my white t-shirt during reading time.
I know that sometimes escaping works for me.
I’m still not likely to spend more than a few minutes in my apartment nowadays. I’ve taken to browsing contracts and rent agreements online in my free time, dutifully comparing in-unit washing machines and preparing to sell my contract the moment the semester’s over.
But there was a brief moment there, on that terrible old tennis court, where I looked up high enough that I couldn’t see any structures around me, and didn’t think about any arm-to-arm walls, and I was fine.
There’s not really a moral to this. But it was such an odd blip in my week that it felt deserving of documentation.
So, there it is.
I’m not gonna disappear, but there’s a high likelihood you’ll be able to find me on the ground of an old tennis court sometime soon. Just sitting there, escaping.
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