The story begins on a train, somewhere in the early 80s, the tracks humming a steady lullaby beneath usāmetal on metal, a rhythm that feels like it knows where itās going, even if I donāt. I am only a year old, small and wordless, sitting beside my mother who is still almost a child herself at seventeen. She stares out the window like sheās searching for something just beyond the glass.
Between us sits a hard plastic cat carrier, and inside it, the cat who has already decided she hates me. Her yellow eyes glow through the slats, unblinking, suspicious. If I get too close, she lets out a low warning hiss, like Iāve already done something wrong just by being there.
I donāt understand any of itāthe tension, the movement, the leaving. But I feel something else. Something bright and fluttering in my chest. Excitement. Like we are going somewhere. Like wherever this train is taking us might finally beā¦ home.
I couldnāt know then that this feelingāthe comfort of motion, of leavingāwould follow me for the rest of my life. That I would move more than fifty times before I turned forty-seven. That home would never be a place, only a direction.
A few years later, in Lowell, Massachusetts, I am four years old and moving quietly down the narrow wooden stairs of our townhouse. The steps creak under my feet, familiar and secret. These are the same stairs where that same mean cat once wrapped herself around my head like a living scarf, claws sinking in as I tried to pry her offāa ridiculous, painful memory that somehow still lingers in the grain of the wood.
At the bottom of the stairs, the house feels too quiet. But I hear her.
My best friend.
Her voice, soft and certain, calling me to come play.
Itās coming from the living roomāfrom behind those enormous speakers, the kind everyone had back then. Black, towering things, taller than me, humming faintly like theyāre alive. I follow the sound without thinking, drawn to it, like itās the most natural thing in the world.
I canāt find her.
But I know sheās there.
I step outside instead, pulled forward by something I donāt understand, and the light hits me all at once. In the yard next door stands her little sisterāso small, so fragileāand sheās screaming.
āYou took her away! You took my sister away!ā
The words donāt make sense. Not at first.
And then they do.
My best friend is dead. She died the day before.
But I just heard her.
Clear as anything.
Calling me.
Something inside me cracks open in that momentāsomething I donāt have words for yet. Confusion, grief, fear, and something elseā¦ something that feels like being untethered.
And that is the first time I run.
Not just from the house, or the yard, or the sound of that little girlās voiceābut from the feeling of not understanding the world Iām standing in. From the way something can be gone and still call your name.
I am four years old.
And already, I am learning how to leave.
