Runaway

I had this idea in fourth grade that I was going to run away from home. This time my plans were more elaborate than usual. I planned it out with Ryan-something from class with Mrs. Reeves. She of the descriptive essay. I usually remember Ryan’s last name when I remember this plan, and it may come to me before I finish writing. He was sweet-looking and blond. He was nicer to me than most kids in fourth grade. He liked me, I think. It felt like it. He felt safe. And I don’t remember him from anything else but fourth grade and these elaborate plans to run away, and I didn’t realize before today that he doesn’t exist in any other memories in my memory. I wonder if he moved. I wonder if I went to school with him for another eight years and just looked through him. I wonder if he joined the awkward, faceless, messy mass of adolescent loathing.

We were supposed to run away together. He must have been miserable, too, but I don’t remember, though it feels like we talked for months or hours or an afternoon, all an age in fourth grade. I had an orange canvas suitcase, which I love about this memory. I don’t think I’ve invented it. It had either an abstract floral pattern or maybe paisley. I wish I still had that suitcase, I would use it for weekends or for work and feel retro and remember the thrill of adventure and escape.

The thrill of adventure and escape was in the planning. And in the very, very early stages of execution. I did pack that suitcase, I think. I think I left it in the front room behind the chair closest to the door. It seems very unlikely to me that it went unnoticed there, but I don’t remember it being noticed or having to explain it. It’s possible that the discovery of my fully packed orange something-print suitcase was not worth reacting to or remarking on. It may have been mundane. Frequent. It’s possible that I had packed that suitcase and prepped for escape an unremarkable and nonreacting number of times to date.

It may have been Ryan Smith.

When we ran away together, we were supposed to meet up at the school and go from there to the train tracks downtown. We were going to hop on a train car and ride the rails west, I think. This, as an adult, is my favorite part of the plan. Here’s why. The elementary school is five miles from the railroad tracks downtown. That doesn’t seem like much now, but in fourth grade that’s kind of like driving from here to Nashville. I know how to get there, and I’ve got the wherewithal, but it’s going to take a very long time. Especially with a tangerine tarpauline suitcase with a cool abstract pattern filled with clothes and probably books and maybe food, but I doubt it, foodwise. I bet it was filled with books.

The other magical thing about this downtown railroad plan is not that we were going to ride the rails, though I suspect that’s what you were thinking. The other magical part is that somehow whatever train we managed to get on with an open car, with a book-bursting piece of luggage, going a mountable speed, with some kind of rungs or steps for climbing, that extraordinary train with all of that astonishingly perfect confluence of accessibility was also somehow, spectacularly, going to be headed west. It’s only later, when I remember Ryan Smith and fourth grade and this plan that I think about and am delighted at the unlikelihood of it all. I’m not surprised at how much was left to accident and synchronicity. That continued to be my modus operandi for quite some time.

There’s another reason this is my favorite part of the tale: more than the packed carrot rough cotton case, more than the downtown train, in addition to the magical west-headed train, our westward sanctuary, our chosen place of haven, was Nebraska. Nebraska.

Nebraska.

I never did run away. I didn’t fetch that suitcase to go anywhere but back to my bedroom, back to the drawers or, more likely, the shelves where its contents lived. Ryan is the one who backed out. He may have gotten into some trouble with the police, though; I feel like there is a soft gray shape at the edges of this memory that jangles a bit, as though he made an early break and it broke him. I know I felt betrayed.

I want that orange canvas suitcase. I want to carry my weekend change of underwear or my work calendar in a cantaloupe sailcloth bit of childlike hope. And as much as that hope, I want that thing back, that sense of innocence and ignorance, that sense of naivete and simplicity and unjaded, unworn credulity that made Nebraska seem like a place of wonder and resurrection. It just seems now too small, too close, too much like home to save me.