The heart wants what it wants, and unfortunately mine was bent on her. A touch of lust, a taste of chapstick and an itch worth scratching.

When you’re young you’re blind enough, stupid enough, to make bad decisions even if you see the consequences coming. Because you also see that you have plenty of time to roll with the punches.

She made me wait. Every time I met her, and I didn’t mind. Hell, I appreciated it. I wanted to wait for her. She was the kind of girl who made you want to wait.

Smoke rose from the puckered mouth of a woman draped in a summer shawl out my window. Her hair shifted and shuddered in the same breeze that swept that smoke away. Traffic ran, busses horned their way into the intersection, and I watched a couple of bums scutter around on their wheel chairs. I had nothing better to do. I had nothing better to do in the whole world than wait for this pretty girl and watch the lives pass by on the other side of the glass.

A twinge of guilt at being caught staring at the man who held a sign that read “Jesus is Weed” forced me face first back into my orange juice. Bitter concentrate that always makes me wince, but it cools my hot face. Cools my hot neck. And burns my stomach.
I left the coffee house to wait for her outside under the shade of the surrounding buildings, glass and cement behemoths that overshadowed the cranes that built them just a few years back. A couple of kids almost ran me over on their bikes and another came up to ask for drug money. Not an insinuation, he flat out told me he needed money for drugs. I let him talk to himself, turned him a deaf ear.

I felt out of place, out of my element. I’m a small town kid, grew up on an island. I wasn’t meant for crowds or towers. I was meant for mountains and blue water.

And when she came up the street to meet me, I forgot all that. I forgot the pain in my throat from drinking citrus, I forgot the sunburn on my face. Instead I set my mind to believing how good she looked in that red sweater.

Here we lay all out worries to bed. Here we sit and think about the day ahead. Here we play with partners new and old. Here we dream dreams so bold.

A bed is a lot of things and even more things to the right people. Some portion of my life, a bed was made to be slept in. Later on, I discovered so many other uses. Staying up late watching TV, building forts, eating cereal and rolling around with my dog, even doing homework seemed more interesting, more tantalizing when I did them in a bed. Maybe it was the taboo nature of it, the idea that this place with a specific purpose could be cheated, tainted by new activities. I never struggled when I was in bed. It was a happy place. Even when I got sick and had to stay home and spent the whole day lying in bed with a trash can near my pillow to catch vomit intermittently, I felt at peace. Nothing could bug me in my microcosm.

A small world designed around small needs. Simple needs that could be met easily and clear the mind. I’ve had some amazing conversations in bed. With friends, parents, lovers and some who fell between categories I could find commonalties. Sharing ideas and worries comes easy when you share first the soft embrace of a world built around the concept of putting a body at rest. Relation between mind and body simplify that knee-jerk reaction to relax.

If a microcosm exists, if there is a world where time can slow and pass at amazing rates, I know where to find it. Tucked in with worn pillows and tattered blankets, sheets that have been packed away and taken out over and over. A microcosm of discovery both mutual or self, heart and mind, as bear as the thread. If you are weary come rest your head.

It’s the place I learned to dream, the place I learned love, the place you can come and go as you please and it’s always the same. Go to bed, little one.

Good night Reader.

There are points in life when you start to feel the need for a change. It happens to everyone. I, myself, have googled the question by which this post earned its title more times than I can remember.

More often than not, when I start to seek advice on how to escape from it all it’s when everything I’ve felt pressured by, school, work, family, friends, bills , et cetera, piles up to the point where I felt as though I would either burst or collapse with the effort of keeping it all together. I’d imagine myself drifting off, losing all contact and starting over. Sometimes the places I’d drift to would be simple places, like a new city in a new state, but as I grew old the places became more extravagant. I would day dream of a new country or being a boat out at sea belonging to no nation.

In the past, when I felt this way, I would usually contend myself with an online search for far off places and the promise that one day I would visit those places. Then I would return to normal life, slightly less overwhelmed than I had been. But every once in a while this mounting desire to escape everything I know did reach an actual breaking point. I can narrow these moments down to six spots in my personal timeline, six pivotal moments where instead of just thinking about running away, I did it.

Just as most of you reading this probably are, I am a rational person. I try to think things through and plan ahead. Mostly. This fact makes it extremely difficult to run away. Difficult, yes, but not impossible. Have hope reader, this is not another blog about dreaming of running off in the night, this is a blog about how to actually do it.
As I said, in my adult life I have actually run away a totally of six times. Once directly following college, once when a family member needed me, and thrice when I just plain became bored with my situation.
After college was easy. I’d finished with a degree and needed a change. Obvious. This played a major role in my realization of the benefit of not running away, but running towards.

There is a lot of focus when someone is running away on the actual ‘away’ factor of it all. It may make sense, but it honestly is not be the best thing to focus on. If you focus too much on getting away from something, you start to lose focus on what you might find once you’ve made it away from the thing you’re escaping. From experience I can tell you, this makes for a lonely life once you’ve landed in your new home. You’ve spent so long thinking about what you’re about to leave that you don’t know what to focus on once you’ve gotten away from it. You end up in a new place with no direction or course of action. This may seem exciting as a concept, but then you realize the amount of work goes into making new friends, finding a home, getting a job and everything else you need to put into place just to satisfy your basic needs.
Instead of thinking of running away as your great escape, it would be best to find something to run towards.

After college, I was running away from a city, an ex-girlfriend, toxic people and a lack of possibilities for creative outlets as well as career goals. I was running away from a lot. And I learned once I got away that I now had to find something new to focus on. I’d spent so much time dwelling on all the negative that I would be free of that I didn’t consider how much I would have to reboot my thought process. In just the time it took for me to drive from New Mexico to Illinois I had all this free space in my head that used to be taken up by those negatives. And it scared me. I felt the void that this move created in me. Even though I’d purged myself of negative thoughts and feelings, I had nothing to replace them. I felt empty.

And it took me months to recover.

The next time I ran away, instead of leaving in a panic, I set my sites on a far off place where people were waiting for me. I chose to move to cities where I would have family, so instead of focusing on getting away from a drab city I could find a city where I could spend time with family. I now had a positive to fill the void that running away creates.
If you don’t have extended family or friends drifting about the country that are willing support you through this move, your other option is a job. Every so often I will toss a job application out to a position in a city I’ve never been to. This may seem silly at first, but once I’ve started applying on jobs outside of my city, I start to think of all the potential. What if I got a job two states away? What if I accepted the offer and I had to move in a month?

Thoughts like that would refresh me and get me thinking of life outside my little bubble. I would see potential in a life I haven’t lived yet. It makes the day-to-day struggles much more palatable. It also makes me feel productive, which is huge for me because I start to get depressed if I don’t feel productive.

I’ve moved for a job twice in my adult life, and I want to say that moving to a new city where I already had work lined-up was so much better than moving to be near family. For one, I instantly felt productive and useful. Sure when I moved for family I had a feeling of being welcome, but being able to instantly appropriate into a new member of society calmed a lot of my nerves that normally light up when I move to a new place.

If you don’t have family in other states or a job waiting for you, it is entirely possible to skip out on life and start over. It’s also entirely possible to drop out of high school then become hugely successful. It’s possible, but there are also easier ways to do it.
As a man who has run away from a lot, I have run towards so much more. And since I’ve started doing that, I’ve found I am a lot happier. You can still find a more exciting life, reader. You can leave toxic environments, people, and jobs. You have so much potential. Don’t waste it on rushing into the next step. Take your time, settle on something positive you can achieve rather than something negative that you can overcome.

As always, reader, thank you so much for stopping by and reading some of my thoughts. Until next time.