The Runner’s Dance – Creative Nonfiction on Survival and Escape

The Runner’s Dance – Creative Nonfiction on Survival and Escape | Daily Tribune

When I remember that painful day, I first remember just how cold my feet were. The water had seeped into my shoes, and my socks made wet sludging sounds with every step I took. Flurries of jeepneys and cars whizzed by, splashing even more rainwater from the dips in the curbs onto the sidewalk. I had no umbrella. No raincoat. Just a tiny backpack, my half-charged phone, and my wallet. I had nowhere to go, but I marched onwards. I ended up in the next city on foot and stopped at a convenience store lit by blue clinical lights. I sat and ate my stale food slowly, and I watched as the sun dropped down the horizon. I knew then I was a runner. It didn’t matter that I still went back home, more than a day later, wet clothes dried by the frigid wind, and my feet numb and musty. I was a runner.

Perhaps it is a rite of passage to go through the childish declaration that you were running away from home. Except in most normal cases (I assume, at least), after a simple cajoling from your parents and a promise of a treat, the thoughts of running fade into just another forgettable whim that you can look back at when you’re older. Maybe you’d even laugh about it later on. But in a home where you learned to dance on broken glass with a perpetual polite smile, the thought of running is more than fleeting. It builds up like a master plan that takes years to concoct. As you stifle your tears at night and hope that other people don’t hear your whimpers, you run the plan in your head like clockwork. Every time you mess up in the plan—whether it is forgetting to pack a toothbrush and a hairbrush, or being caught as you made a desperate attempt to escape your prison—you quickly revise and run it again. By the time I was eleven, I had figured out how to choose a place to go to. By the time I was thirteen, I had figured out how I was going to survive on my own. Would I be faced with difficulties? Yes. Had I considered that all this was easier said, easier thought of than done? Of course I did. But I was willing to risk everything.

My father left. My mother stayed. I was four years old. Memories are hazy, clouded by the cotton candy pink of Barbies and the cherry red of my stuffed bear. But in the background, there was screaming. There were throwing things. There was peeking from behind my bedroom door, and I wasn’t even tall enough yet to reach the knob. I saw how my mother clung on tight to him, how her hands bore the effort it took to piece our family together. He resisted. He ran. The day he left, we were at church, and it was Palm Sunday. Amidst the joyful singing of the churchgoers and the orange afternoon light, my mother’s gaze burned the cross with its desperation and sadness.

Then, I grew up in a home with my cousin and my aunts. Mother was frequently away, working hard on her own to raise two young children. In her absence, I learned confusing etiquette that wielded paddleboard hits and poisonous words at every fault. I learned to sing and dance in coal-hot iron slippers and to look happy and polite while I did so. Each day, my vocabulary grew bigger than what was expected of my age. In first grade, I knew how to spell disappointment, jealousy, and attitude. I knew how to say sorry more than I knew how to say please and thank you. Suddenly, I began to understand the urge to run. The urge gnawed at me, similar to how a trapped animal wants to chew off its leg to get free. One morning when I was six, after being punished for something I didn’t do, I ran out of the house and into the street. I almost got hit by a silver sedan. The pounding of my heart and the buzzing in my head was the first high I got that dulled all my pain. Running was my secret drug.

Years later, my mother was still a flickering image that disappeared into late nights and came home with eyes too tired and sad. She did not notice yet that her first daughter was not quite right. She didn’t see the damage inflicted on me in her absence back at my aunt’s house, or the damage being inflicted on me at school. She failed to see that I had gotten hold of the drug that my father took when he decided to abandon us. So when she and I got into a big fight—insignificant compared to the other bad things in my life, looking back on it now—I walked out of the apartment. All I had with me was a biscuit that I was supposed to eat in school before that weekend. When she remembers that story now, she laughs at the childishness of it all: My daughter, running away from home, with a biscuit! Isn’t it funny?

She wasn’t laughing the next time I ran, though. By then, I had become a hurricane out of control. I used to be the golden child, but now, I was the black sheep. I skipped class. My grades dropped. I started marking my skin until it bore red, pink, and white stripes. I got drunk. I retreated into my head until I was unreachable. Insane. I stood on the line between life and death, and I danced recklessly, almost tumbling onto the other side far too many times. She and I were stuck in a game of pushing and pulling, never quite letting go, and instead leaving claw marks on each other until we were a mess of blood, gnashing teeth, and tearful screaming. I wanted to beg her for her forgiveness. I wanted her to beg me for mine.

I was thirteen. Only thirteen. And I knew then that the will to live was gone. I took my backpack, and I only had two hundred pesos. While my mother was too busy locking herself up in her room, I slipped away. I walked and walked. I stopped at intersections and watched as the rain fell to the ground. I kicked stones in my way, jumped into puddles, and got my jeans wet. Cars sprayed water onto me. I kept walking.

And somehow, I seemingly ended back where it all started. I ended up inside a church despite my resentment for its Master. I sat on the pew, my eyes burning the cross with desperation and sadness. More than a day had passed. I was too tired to keep going. Maybe, in another universe, I would have slept in that church that night. I would wake up before someone kicked me out, and I’d keep running further and farther away from home. Or maybe, I would have jumped in front of a busy road. Or stopped on a bridge and let myself fall. But something happened. As I rested my feet on the knee rest and placed my damp bag next to me, I glanced up at the crucified figure. I was overcome with emotions I still struggle to name. Was it anger? Sadness? Did I pray for salvation, or did I pray for damnation?

Either way, I stood up and walked away. But before I left the church, I turned around one last time and gave Him the finger. Then I went home, tail between my legs. There was more yelling, and there will be more and more yelling after that over the years. But I learned one thing that night: I was a runner. I have what it takes to leave everything behind when I finally decide to end it all. I was no longer dancing on the line between life and death. I was that line.