Sometimes I fantasise about throwing my suitcase into the car, taking off down the highway, sucking up that white line like spaghetti and running away from it all road-movie-style.
Sometimes I am on my own escaping my current life and indulging the exquisite loneliness of solitary travel. Other times I have my son with me and we are on the run together – Bonnie and Clyde meets Bananas in Pyjamas.
There are so many ways to run away from ourselves: to wrestle with all that stuff between responsibility and romance, commitment and excitement.
Sometimes I wish I could just disappear. Not forever. It’s not some kind of a death wish but more like an urge to put the pedal to the metal of the great life force.
I was at the theatre recently, and during the interval I hid in the loo.
There I was behind the locked toilet door waiting for the audience’s usual chitchat and glass clinking to stop so I could go back in for the second half.
I’ve worked in the theatre for over twenty years, in one way or another, and have always felt at home in it, more or less. But that night I needed to hide from my so-called family. That night morphing into someone else – like how that character Mystique does it in X-Men – seemed like a good career move.
When a friend phoned me, breathless and excited, from her car one night, I knew I wasn’t alone in my once-in-a-while-need-to-flee.
‘I’ve just left home. I couldn’t stand my family any more so I just picked up my bag and left.’
Top Comments
I think about it all the time. I think about running and never looking back. Sometimes I think they would all be better off without me. I crave the simple living. Finding food and reading books.
I think about it several times a year. I don't really have a family, or at least not what I think a family should be. I get to see my children maybe twice a year, but never at the same time. We live within 250 miles of each other. I just wonder if I could move far away I could somehow justify that I am not included in their families. I was a good mom. I raised them mostly on my own. They all went to college and have professional careers. I am tired of happily anticipating holidays only to be called with cancellations at the last minute. I wish I could just live somewhere I like, be me and not just someone's old mom. Sometimes I feel like leaving and not telling anyone where i am. Then I think that would be selfish. What a life...