(Photo: Sif/Aaron Seaman, Canyonlands National Park, Utah, 2017)

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It didn’t matter if it was racing through a remote desert slot canyon or bursting out of our house to escape the sound of fists on flesh—I was born to run. Run like the bullet trains we learned about in school that fly down the Japanese coast, piercing the morning fog. Run like the starving cheetah who needs a kill to survive. Run like the wind in a hurricane that destroys everything in its path.

I ran to focus. I ran to escape. I ran because I had nowhere else to go.

I didn’t always run though. I remember dreading P.E. in middle school. I never understood why we had to be in uniform anyway. It was a public school. All those embarrassingly short shorts that felt like they came from the 70s and the shirts that were somehow never large enough to hide my amorphous, cookie dough figure, let alone my shame.

I was fat.

My grandma used to try and be nice by calling me “husky” (whatever that meant), but I was fat. And being the fat kid is brutal. Every time I put on our P.E. uniforms, I felt like everyone was staring at me and laughing. Every noise was a whisper, and every whisper was a secret joke they were telling about me. Worse yet, every time we ran, I could never keep up with the other kids—the kids who did sports and were skinny and popular. I would always end up red-faced, lungs on fire, chugging along like a broken locomotive. Like the little engine who couldn’t.

Also, we had grown up poor.

By “we” I mean me, my little sister, and my parents. And by “poor”, I mean “no power” poor. Or more accurately, “green Coleman two-burner camp stove in the house because we had no power” poor. For anyone who grew up like we did, you know exactly what I mean when I mention grape soda and government cheese or food stamps and food banks.

In fact, one of my first food memories is the horrible generic lemon fruit pies we’d get from the food bank by the dozen. Not the real ones that come from Hostess with the fake pieces of fruit in them. No, food bank fruit pies were always semi-stale, with a supernatural radioactive yellow color to their filling, and weird generic brand names like “Great Family” or “Sup-R-Value”—and they were always lemon.

I never understood how there could be no other fruit pie flavor being made in all of the fruit pie factories in the known world. Seriously. I’m not kidding. The only thing I could ever figure was that there was a conspiracy where all the brand-name fruit pie makers sent their excess fruit pies to some weird generic factory where they relabeled them and sent them on to various charities. But only the lemon fruit pies got sent to the food banks. This was to punish us poor kids, of course. I know that wasn’t it, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel like that at the time. In the end, it didn’t matter whether I understood, the flavor was still (always) lemon.

Week in and week out.

Until I die.

Lemon-pocalypse hellscape.

Blech.

And yes, I still hate anything lemon-flavored as an adult, if you’re wondering.

At any rate, you could tell that we were poor other ways than coming over to our house for dinner though, too. I didn’t have a pair of jeans that fit correctly, or even a real brand-new pair of jeans until I was in my mid-twenties. As a kid, mine were either too long or too short, too short running an astronomically higher risk of being teased for wearing “high waters” pants. Let’s just say that the gods weren’t kind to me in the length-of-pants department and that I was teased a fair amount during my middle school years.

But being poor and eating radioactive food bank lemon fruit pies wasn’t the worst thing about our family. The worst thing about our family was the fights my mom and dad would have. When we were younger it would be the screaming matches. After a while when they would start, I learned to grab my little sister and tell her some lie that it was time to go play in the back bedroom. I learned to keep Barbies and pillows back there for that reason—the Barbies to distract her, the pillows to cover our ears if it got really bad, though she just thought they were for building pillow forts. She also loved it when her bigger brother played Barbie with her. It was easy to convince her.

By sophomore year of high school, I had grown up instead of out, and the out had eventually disappeared. The fights had gotten really bad and my sister was old enough to know that I was trying to keep her from the worst of it. They fought about money mostly, but sometimes I flat out thought they hated each other. Once, when my sister was staying over at a friend’s house, it even got so bad that my mom threw a plate at my dad’s head. He ducked as it shattered into a million pieces on the kitchen wall behind him.

That was the first time I saw him hit her.

It was also the first time I ran.

My mom crumpled to the floor in a heap, hand to her mouth and blood running from her nose. My dad screaming, “Woman, see what you made me do!” as if he’d somehow been pushed too far and had been forced to hit her. My mom looked at me with eyes wide, and without a word I knew her fear. And I knew she meant for me to get out of that kitchen as fast as I could.

My dad screamed that everything was “Fine! Just fine!” and warned me not to leave. But I knew better deep down.

Suddenly I flinched from the violence in the kitchen and bolted for the front door. Twisting the knob and throwing it open in one swift gesture, I flew down the front steps in a single leap, sticking the landing and continuing down the driveway into oblivion. Tears streamed from my swollen eyes as adrenaline filled my pumping veins.

Anywhere but here, I thought.

Anywhere but home.

And it felt good. It felt good to know that I was in control. Felt good to leave the past behind, one pumping, churning footstep at a time. It also felt good to forget. I didn’t care about the consequences, I just knew I needed to be free of that hell.

I needed control. I needed release. And I needed safety.

It was almost dark by the time I stopped, and I have no clue how far I ran. A mile? Maybe ten? I only know that when I finally quit running down by the beach, surrounded by the skeletons of old trees from far away countries, I was sweaty, red-faced, and out of breath. My shirt had wet patches on it, my jeans were muddy at the bottom, and my shoes were soaked through. If I hadn’t noticed the lighthouse, I may not have even known where I was. It was like both space and time had ended, transporting me to some other plane of existence—one away from my parents.

I stood there panting, watching the twilight, and thinking about my life for the first time. I thought about my parents and their bad choices. How I didn’t fit in at school (and figured I never would). I thought about my sister and how I had to keep her safe from my parents. And I thought about how I was going to do that.

Afterward, on the long, dark walk home, I thought about the responsibility that I, a 15-year-old kid, had to bear. I wondered what had I done wrong.

But none of it really mattered to me after that first run. That’s the thing. After the clarity that night brought me, I only cared about how my sister and I were going to move on from this. How I would carry us up and out of that hell that my parents were so in love with, no matter what it took. How I would keep my sister safe and that we both would make a pact to never, ever, be like our parents.

My parents finally divorced shortly after I graduated high school. I immediately got a full-time job and worked all my hours, and any overtime shifts I could get to save up enough to get my own place. Within six months, I had rented my own apartment near the house so my sister could come over. My mom was shocked when I told her. Go figure.

Six years later—almost the exact day my sister turned 18—she left my mom’s house to come and live with me. From the second she moved in we knew we were both finally free of our parents’ bad decisions. All the fights and screaming and food banks. All of it. It felt…gone. It was like popping a balloon.

We both eventually grew up and had families of our own, with barbeques and birthdays and holidays—all of the things we never had.

And me and my sister, we never ate government cheese again. And we never touched another lemon fruit pie in our lives—generic or not. We never cooked on propane camp stoves and we never let the power go out because we couldn’t pay. And we loved our families. Loved them like we should have been loved—like everyone should be loved.

And I ran. Every day. I even got my little sister into it. She ran track in high school, even got a school record in the 5k. But I didn’t run to escape anymore. I didn’t run because I didn’t know where else to go. I ran with purpose, and I ran to remember. To never forget. I ran to make sure that I never had to live like that again. That no one had to live like that. Most importantly, I ran for me and for others like me who need to know that we are not defined by our past—no matter what that past is.