Stray: Memoir of a Runaway

When I left, I took everything with me...I reached under my bed where there were two leather-bound journals that had gold lettering on the front covers and that fastened with a flimsy lock. I read the lettering out loud to myself and gingerly placed the books into my backpack. Diary.

I watched her, not knowing what I could possibly say to make it better. We only knew the language of violence. It was a harsh language, effective, exacting, like using a knife.

The desire to be loved by him was so strong that I ostracized Mom with zeal, with the kind of blind allegiance reserved for a cult leader.

After a year of sobriety, Dad started drinking again. He gave us no excuses and no end date. One day he was sober and the next day he was drinking.

All it took were these small acts of kindness for me to forgive him. I held him to a lower standard, expected much less from him because he demanded that we accept his unpredictability.

But when confronted with a need that contradicted hers, or with emotional turmoil that she couldn’t control, she shut off.

The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

When you’re just thinking about surviving, when you’ve been abused and berated, hurt as a child before you even had the language to describe the hurt like I had, you come to believe that the world is a traumatic place, without respite. Holding someone’s hand doesn’t just scare you—it makes you feel like cutting it off. And that’s when you know you’re in a lot of trouble.

assume that this new place was home and then look for evidence to support that claim, whether it was there or not.

I also know how little it takes to break a broken person.

Drinking the liquor felt awful and then suddenly fortifying. Buzzing warmth spread from the place where the bottle kissed my mouth. My veins felt hot, like they were filling with electric blood, and the trees hummed along to the sound of the creek, a night song of wind and leaves and the rushing of water over rock.

We were magical and alive - we cared about music and conversation, sex and spit and blood, holding on tight to the space between youth and adulthood. When I look back at that time, my nostalgia can be blinding. Because we weren’t night dwellers, vampires who would live forever. We were a bunch of kids playing at being Lost Boys, looking for our version of Neverland.

Garret played me Trent Reznor’s music video “Broken,” a series of cut-and-paste video clips of animal pornography and people shooting themselves. I didn’t understand it, though Garret tried to explain it to me—something about American culture being overwhelmed by commodification and the resulting depression we feel at being controlled by the hidden politics of a truly fascist state. Or something like that. I wanted to know how Garret found out what a particular song meant, or about Danzig and “She Sells Sanctuary” by the Cult, or when Skinny Puppy was putting out their next album, or who Bauhaus was.