When I was six years old, I ran away from home. Not because
I had done something bad and gotten into a load of trouble. Not because a new
baby or puppy had arrived that made me feel a lack of attention. I did it
because I was bored on a summer afternoon and remembered seeing an episode of Full House where little Michelle (who in
TV land was around my same age at the time) runs away from home. That led me to
believe that all little kids were supposed to run away from home at some point.
So yes, I rebelled by running away, because I thought that was what I was
supposed to do (worst rebel ever).
My time on the lam basically went like this:
I took some books and snacks in a bag and left my house
without telling anyone. I then crossed the street by myself, because “Who says
I’m not big enough to cross the street on my own!?” and walked a block down the
sidewalk. There I sat on the grass by the side of the road next to a crooked
sapling tree and waited.
After a while (probably 30 minutes or so) I started getting
bored and a little bit miffed that no one had come to look for me yet like TV
family members do. Yet I continued to sit there for a while longer, until
someone in a car stopped and asked what I was doing. Not wanting to talk to a
stranger, I just said “nuffing” and continued to glare into the distance
grumpily. The person said, “Well, you shouldn’t sit so close to the road. Do
you know why that little tree is crooked? It’s because someone hit it with
their car, and that could happen to you too.”
The stranger was probably well meaning, but being talked to
by some rando was the last straw and I decided that I was done with all this
running away business. So, I walked the short distance to my house and went
back inside. Only to find that for the hour I had been gone, no one had
noticed.
I later used the experience as inspiration for a story I
wrote and submitted to a young author’s writing contest. In the story, entitled,
“The Prank I played on the Worst Day of my Life,” one of the things that made
the protagonist’s day so terrible was that she ran away from home and nobody
noticed. I didn’t win any prizes for that story, which is not surprising
because, in retrospect, the writing was horrible even for a six year old, but
that is kind of some deep shit right there when you think about it.
