What I Ran Towards Taught Me How to Love the Thing I Left Behind

There’s a version of me awake in her room in the middle of the night. This version wears a hoodie and sweatpants to bed. She sits with the hoodie pulled over her head, sings Youtube karaoke at the top of her lungs. This version wonders why her brother doesn’t talk to her much. Wonders what he’s doing in his room, knows he’s not asleep yet.

There’s a version of me who is 15. Sometimes, I feel like I can only write about her.

She reads poetry on Tumblr, whispers it aloud, re-reading until she gets the cadence down. She sprints from the bedroom to the kitchen, grabs a snack, and sprints back. She thinks she’s afraid of the dark, but silence is the one who sends her running.

This version joins me every time I sit down to write. She flashes into my head, an image of her with the desktop computer tower whirring at her feet and the fan clicking a steady rhythm above. Enchanted and suspended in time, she sits and waits to hear what I have to say.

I started writing this because I think maybe she wants to be acknowledged, like a ghost awaiting the other side. I want to tell her it’s safe where she is. She can let go of the future because I’ve let go of the past. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know how we can actually quantify that.

There is a version of me who just spent days at her friend Sisi’s house, surrounded by sky. Last time I went to my hometown, I sent a picture of the flat fields just outside city limits to my boyfriend. I said, look! It’s like an ocean of land. No people, no buildings in sight. Just horizon for miles.

Sisi’s house sat at the edge of that expanse with two goats and a trampoline in the backyard. One Summer, Sisi and I spent almost every day together. We’d pretend One Direction was surveilling our every move and act as if we were being filmed without our knowledge. Harry Styles was, of course, falling in love from afar. I imagined he thought it was hot how the goats chewed my shoelaces and turned them green.

(Side note: I need a study to be done about why all the romantic daydreaming about One Direction was egregiously or subtly creepy & controlling. Why were we all so obsessed with the idea of being kidnapped? As Sofia Isella might say, “A woman who doesn’t want it is much hotter than one that does.”)

When people ask what I did for fun in my hometown, I usually come up blank because the truth is, we mainly hung out at each other’s houses. Otherwise, we were at choir practice. Or, occasionally, breaking the law in the lamest ways possible. We didn’t get invited to parties with drugs and alcohol, so we just kind of wondered around town and trespassed.

I remember one February night, having an illegal picnic with friends on the rooftop of a random small business after we drove all the way out to a sunflower field on the edge of town. The flowers were, understandably, dead. The night was, understandably, dark. We realized we forgot to plan for these obvious inevitabilities and circled back to the city lights. We sat eye level with telephone lines, drank Dr. Pepper and spoke about heartbreak.

I remember breaking into an abandoned putt-putt and crawling under the roof of a mini-golf cave to do a nighttime photoshoot with friends. We would do this often, find pockets of intrigue in a city we all found quite barren and uninteresting most of the time. It was a challenge to ourselves to see if we could find anything out of the ordinary in a city built on sameness. Years later, the abandoned putt-putt burnt down. I felt hollow when I heard about it, thousands of miles away. Felt my heart being scooped out with a spoon, ached for us all to be back together under that cereal bowl sky.

I remember the open door policy at my friend Megan’s place. Senior year, I went over nearly everyday after school. We’d often sneak our friend out (they didn’t have a free period) just to go to Walmart. We’d grab TV dinners and go to Megan’s to watch Project Runway or Rupaul’s Drag Race.

There is a version of me who is still with them in that room, under (or on top of) those roofs. But those friends no longer live in those houses. We all scattered across the country, didn’t look back. There was nothing for us in our hometown except each other. & naively, I thought I could take them with me. Thought they’d all end up in my city one day.

Now when I’m back there, I don’t have those houses, don’t have those couches to sink into. Even my parents moved when I went away. Now when I go home, I think of them in the mall parking lot, surrounded by grackles. I once got my ears pierced with Sisi at this mall. Once grimaced on the way to the car, shoo’d off hoards of black birds gathering on the roof. Plagues. Groups of them are called plagues. They can be eery and unwelcoming until they’re in the sky. In the sky, they dance.

There is a version of me who sees them all the time but doesn’t know what they’re called. She doesn’t like grackles and she’d get a kick out of calling them plagues. There is also a version of me writing now who never really sees them anymore, but knows their name. Knows these dances are called murmurations and they’re a pleasure, a privilege to witness. Scoop my heart out with a spoon.

“At least here, we have the best sky,” my mom used to say. Fifteen year old me rolls her eyes. That girl is in love with people, not sky. No matter the sunsets, no matter the paintings made of wings up there, she wants to be in rooms with people she loves. Popcorn ceiling and all. She wants a horizon blocked by buildings, more roofs to picnic on.

Now when I go home, I stand in the mall parking lot alone. I look up and watch birds make clouds their dance floor. I know they’re responding to the seven neighbors closest to them at all times. I know I’ve been doing something similar all my life.

I didn’t need to move to a city to find people I love, I already had them. But moving to a place where there are people gathering at all times - above me, below me, to my right, and to my left - has created a version of me who appreciates the sky. Now, I know what it is to move like the birds. To look for safety in numbers, to watch friends fly away, to fight your way to the center just to retreat, to feel the warmth of moving things. I look up because I know there are stories in places I once refused to see.

I grew up in a place most people call “ugly.” My uncle referred to it as “the armpit of America” at Thanksgiving. Even then, I’m not immune to nostalgia. In that place, under a cereal bowl sky, under (and on top of) roofs that buried boredom, I fell in love with people. After running towards people, I fell in love with sky.

There’s a version of me awake in her room in the middle of the night. She doesn’t know it yet, but her dreams will change. Soon, she’ll have a completely different list of things to care about, to stay awake for. But she needs to care this way, needs to feel her discontent knocking around, pushing until the roof falls away. One day, the knocking will be enough to push her out of the nest, to fly somewhere, look around and say, “At least here, we have the best sky.”

There is a version of me wearing a hoodie and sweatpants to bed, singing Youtube karaoke, and wondering why her brother doesn’t talk to her much. There are a lot of things we disagree on. She wonders why I’m researching murmurations, wonders why I’m not on Broadway. Still, she watches me write. I pull up a chair.