asking you
oh my goodness, sometimes i cannot stand to be with my entire family for more than two hours at a time. (and sometimes not even that long.) that may sound sad, but it's true. and i'm betting that the majority of people can relate.i was thinking how it was weird the other day, when we were driving through houston to get to the beach. because when i decided to run away, the day before i ended up going into the hospital for the first time, houston was where i headed. i actually wanted to end up in galveston island, maybe at the public beach where we went the other day, but more likely i would have taken the ferry across the bay and out to one of the private beaches on...i don't know, mustang island or something. the whole point was, i wanted to end up at the beach, at the ocean, because no other place in nature has a more calming effect on me. i wanted to be alone: just me, the night sky, and the vastness of the ocean. i wanted it so badly that i got in my dad's truck, filled it up at a gas station, and then headed down highway 6 at somewhere between 80 and 90 mph.
i never did make it to the ocean though. i didn't really know how to get there; so much time had passed since i'd last been. i had no map (actually i think there was one in the glove compartment, but the glove compartment is stuck shut), and i didn't feel like stopping to buy one. i knew that to get down to galveston you had to go through houston, so i followed road signs that pointed toward houston. once i got there though, i had absolutely no idea where i was. i had been driving for a good 2 or 3 hours by then, and it was getting late. i stopped off at a burger king and got myself some dinner with the few dollars i had left.
by that time, i was starting to feel the tiniest bit of remorse about running away. i thought that, just maybe, my parents would be worried. and i thought, probably, that john would also be worried. maybe they would even start looking for me sometime soon. don't get me wrong -- i was still feeling absolutely crazy. i really was, which was what had pushed me to running away in the first place. but my sense of needing to please everyone kind of overshadowed that. so i got back in the truck and drove back home.
like i said, i never did make it to the ocean that time. now that i think about it, it's probably a good thing. because i felt like edna, in the awakening, and in my mind i always see the very end of that novel: the way that she told everyone she was "going for a swim" when really all she wanted to do was walk into the water and keep on walking, never looking back, until the water closed in over her head and stole the breath from her lungs. and that's exactly what she did. would i have done the same?
i want to say no, i want to say never, but to be honest i don't know. only God knows, and He knew then, and maybe that's why i never did make it to galveston that night.
it's weird, the things we remember, and even moreso, the things we cannot.