If I Had Run

[CW: Implications of abuse]

I track the dark and stormy evening with me into the mud room. If I believed in an empathetic universe, I would say the weather was a pathetic fallacy written into reality just so I wouldn't feel so alone with the storm in my head right now. If. It's a nice thought regardless.

I walk into the kitchen and set the bag of groceries down with a thunk. Too loud. I cringe, listen. The whole house holds its breath. One beat, two beats. Then I hear a snore from the living room and let out the breath I'm holding. It’s funny, in that way that’s all gallows humour, I must have learned something akin to echolocation because I can tell my father is on the armchair and not on the couch just by his snores. It means he won’t have a line of sight into the kitchen when he wakes.

I clear away the bottles and unpack the groceries slowly, carefully setting each item down exactly where it belongs and not a millimetre out of place, until I reach a little rectangle of shiny cardstock sitting on top of the six pack of beer. I frown and fish it out, turning it over. The words, “Do you need help?” are written in bold pink text just above a number with an area code for the city half an hour’s drive out of our shabby little backwater town. I stare at the blocky text for way too long before hurriedly opening the door under the sink and throwing it into the trash. I crumple up some paper towel and shove it in there too, just in case, then let out a breath. That lady in the produce aisle must’ve slipped it in when I wasn’t looking. She’d tried to offer it to me with that look that I sometimes get when I go out with bruises on my face. I hate that look. It’s one of the reasons I find myself inside more often than not these days. I think she was one of my mother’s church friends, the ones she used to get together with to bake cookies for the church bake sales. Susan, maybe? She looked like a Susan. One of those people with a heart that bled all over everyone and too much damn time on their hands.

Thinking about the church ladies makes me think of mom, and it’s startling to realize it’s been a long time since I let myself think about her. There’s a dam around all my emotions – all the soft and delicate and jagged and raw places in my heart – especially the ones about her, and I like to stay at least ten feet away from it at all times. They can’t hurt me on that side of the wall. But the card has set me on edge with this low-grade panic I can’t rationalize. It’s fine. Everything’s okay. Nothing’s changed. And yet, there’s a small crack. I find myself moving, needing just a moment of feeling connected to her. I’m in the office before I realize it, kneeling on the floor, reaching to the back of the bottom shelf for the dusty box with the family album.

There’s just the one, ‘cause dad thought it was fussy and a waste of time and made her stop. There’s more than just the album in this box, though: there are envelopes, letters, and lots of random papers. Curious, I pick one up. It’s a letter addressed to dad from three years ago. I pick up another. An old receipt from a large order of flowers, this one from two years ago. Mom’s funeral, probably. The next envelope makes me pause, though, because it’s addressed to me. “To Michelle” is printed in neat but cramped handwriting, with no return address. It’s unopened, but the paper is slightly yellowed as if it’s been in here for a long time. My original goal of the album forgotten for the moment in favour of this mystery, I carefully pry it open.

I fish out a letter, precisely folded in thirds. I open it. All it takes is the first line, “Dear Shell,” for the echoes of the anger and pain and heartbreak of the last time anyone called me that to surface with a vengeance.

Daniel.

I have to drop the letter and lean my head against the shelves. He is the only one who has ever called me Shell. Not Michelle like my teachers, or Mich like my friends, or even Elle, but Shell, like I was one of the beautiful seashells that littered our favourite beach. I close my eyes as a wave of memories assaults me, threatening to bowl me over. We would sneak out of our parents’ homes to sequester ourselves on a small, empty stretch of beach and spend hours gazing up at the stars. It’s where we had our first kiss. And our last. It’s where he broke my heart.

I open my eyes and stare angrily at the letter sitting innocently on the floor. How does something so innocuous as a piece of paper have the ability to dredge up five-year-old memories I had built such thick walls around? The letter is a jackhammer, digging up the past with the zealous intent of a forest fire. I try to burn a hole through it with my gaze.

Then, I start to wonder. What could Daniel have possibly written me a letter for? Neither of us had had cell phones, sure, but we’d never been a love letters sort of couple. Just the thought of one of our parents finding an ill-hidden page of confessed feelings sends a reflexive spike of fear through me, even now. Something else occurs to me: when did he write the letter? Had he sent it from whatever city he had ended up in after his great escape, or had he sent it before he left?

I still remember the taste of the salty wind as Danny had stared up at the stars, decidedly not looking at me. I’m leaving, he’d said, with the finality of a judges' gavel and that final shovel of dirt over a grave. My entire world had splintered apart and crashed down around me, leaving my ears ringing. I had wanted to beg and plead and cry – so damn hard it had made me feel like I was unravelling – but he had already made his decision, I could see it in his eyes. He couldn’t take it anymore, he’d said. One more month in our tiny backwater town would kill him, he’d said. You’re not enough to make me stay, he hadn’t said, but I’d felt it anyway.

The curiosity has its hooks in me, reeling me toward the letter before I’ve really made up my mind. The need to know has me picking it back up and turning it so I can read the rest of it.

Dear Shell,

I know you’re not expecting this letter. I know you’re probably furious with me, and you have every right to be.

I am so sorry. So sorry I was so abrupt. That I didn’t give you more warning. I’ve been thinking about leaving for a while, have been dreaming about it almost constantly, actually – every moment that you are not with me. When you’re here, it feels like everything is okay, that everything else is worth it. That my parents’ dismissals and the bullying and all the expectations and pain and this feeling of suffocating all the time – it’s all okay when I see you. You never seemed like you wanted to leave though, even after your dad became… well, more awful. I know you don’t want to leave your mother. So, I never brought it up.

But on Sunday… I knew it was my tipping point. I have to leave. I can’t stay here anymore, not even for your smiles and terrible jokes and every other perfect thing about you. It’ll kill me.

I have to stop reading to rub angrily at my eyes. It was the same thing he’d said to me on the beach our last night, and five years of separation doesn’t make the words any easier. There’s a lump in my throat and it’s hard to breathe. I can still hear the ghost of his music, the way he’d gently pluck the strings of his battered guitar while I told him about the planets and the constellations and anything else I’d read about since the last time we’d managed to steal away time together. I take a few deep breaths, then continue reading the letter.

I regret that so much now, not talking about this sooner. If I had let you in on my plans… maybe last night wouldn’t have been such a mess. I’m sorry, so sorry.

But there is a truth that I have been avoiding confronting, and it is more terrifying than anything else: I can’t be without you, Shell. It’s barely been a day and already the thought of not seeing you for the rest of my life is unbearable.

So, I ask what I should have last night: run away with me?

I stare numbly at the words, feeling the blood drain from my face. It feels like my world is crashing in around me, on top of me, smothering me under the weight. I trace the words with my shaking fingers, over and over, not believing I’m reading them right.

Come with me, and we can find a place together in some city as far away from here as we can get. You would be able to be out from under your father and do something with that brilliant mind of yours. You could be incredible, Shell, if you let yourself dream outside of this cesspool.

It’ll be hard but I don’t care, we deserve so much better than this. There’s a whole world out there.

So what do you say?

Meet me at our beach on Sunday at midnight. I’ll wait for you. We’ll take the train to the next city over, then however many trains we need to. If you’re not there… I guess that will be my answer.

And you might think me a coward for writing this letter instead of coming to talk to you, and you’d be right, but I don’t think I can take seeing your face if you were to tell me that our love isn’t enough. I think that would break me.

So, please, Shell. Think about it. Run away with me. We can have a new life. One where we decide the rules.

I love you.

Always yours,

– Daniel.

There’s small dark circles forming on the paper and it takes me several moments to realize they’re my tears, sliding down my cheeks and dripping off my chin. I bury my face in my hands and sob silently, letting his words bulldoze the dam I had erected around my emotions these last five years. My shoulders shake. I want someone to hold me. No one does – there’s no one left who cares enough to.

I think about barely eighteen-year-old Daniel, always starry-eyed and unsure, waiting on the stones by that beach, picking the seams of his sleeves apart as the minutes ticked by and it slowly dawned on him that I wasn’t coming. I wonder how long he waited and my heart squeezes painfully. He was always such a gentle soul. Even though I haven’t seen his face in half a decade I can picture him clearly, the unruly curls and expressive eyebrows and persistent smell of mint he always chewed after I made him quit cigarettes. I can imagine him standing there in the dark, desperately scanning every movement in the trees, and how his face would have crumpled when he accepted he’d be getting on that train alone. Setting off on his “new life” alone. I wonder if he thought about coming to look for me. How long it took him to forget me. Where he is now. If he ever got to play his guitar on stage, hear the roar of an adoring crowd.

“Michelle!”

The shout comes from the living room and I cringe, fear spiking my heart rate. I have to consciously unclench my fists and force air into my lungs. I stagger to my feet. I know that tone.

If only I had run away with him, I think achingly, the grief in my chest hard to breathe around for a moment. It’s grief for him, for our love, for the last of my innocence that losing him ripped away from me. But mostly, it’s grief for myself, and the life I could have lived if only I had known that he wanted me to come with him. If I’d been brave enough to go find him and demand he let me come along. Lazy mornings in some studio apartment in the city, filled with easy conversation and easier kisses. Astronomy classes at a community college scraped together from two part time jobs, and maybe someday teaching other starry-eyed kids the beauty of the sky. Watching Danny light up from the inside when he played for others, like the music was a million fireflies contained in his veins. Freedom; peace. Being able to live in my own home without being afraid of walking too loud or talking too quiet or existing too goddamn noticeably.

Suddenly, a realization hits me like a brick to the back of the head. I grip the shelf with my free hand as I sway, the breath whooshing from my lungs. I had never seriously thought about it before. It had never seemed like an option. I had just resigned myself to being stuck here, like my mother was. But with Daniel’s letter clutched in my white-knuckled grip, I read over the words again.

Run away with me.

Run away.

What if I did?

It feels so obvious now that I feel stupid for not having truly considered it sooner. Even when Daniel left I blocked it out, never letting myself dwell on it because it hurt too bad. And he’d been right about one thing – I would have been afraid to leave my mom alone with my father and his every escalating drunken belligerence. But I knew with a burning certainty that if I had gotten this letter in time I would have gone with him. And if I would have been willing to run away with him… why couldn’t I run away myself, now? Daniel managed it, after all. My heart is racing and my hands are sweaty, and all I can see is the rage on his face if he knew I was even thinking about leaving.

“Michelle!”

The shout comes again and it feels like he knows, can hear my thoughts through the walls. I have to battle away the vicious panic that has wrapped itself around my throat, shove it down far enough so I can breathe and think and move – dammit Michelle move. I stuff the letter back in the box and the box under the shelf and a moment later I’m closing the door and running on silent feet down to the living room.

That night, I quietly sneak downstairs, fishing the business card from the kitchen trash. In the moonlight spilling in through the kitchen window, I stare at the blocky pink letters, at my hand gripping it tightly with new finger-shaped bruises darkening on my wrist. At the phone number and the neatly printed letters just above it asking “Do you need help?” It feels like it’s speaking directly to me. Maybe it’s the church lady’s voice, or my mother’s, or Daniel's. It doesn’t matter.

I make my decision.

It’s too late for mine and Daniel’s future, but maybe it’s not too late for mine.

Fin.