At first, it's easy. It's nothing more than the idea that maybe you can do something about your situation, and you begin turning it over in your head, massaging it, pinching it, pulling it until it begins to take shape. Instead of taking notes in your tenth grade math class, you make a list of what you'll need: Deodorant, toothpaste, changes of underwear, warm clothes. You save and buy yourself a new backpack, a pretty red one, because this one has seen better years - eight of them, in fact - and instead of taking it to school with you, you hide it under your bed. And you begin to fill it.
All the while you tell yourself that it's nothing more than a flight of fancy, but you are building yourself a door, and knowing that you can turn the knob and step out of it if you need to makes your home life easier to bear. You don't know where that door leads. It doesn't matter.
You are in the drug store one evening buying the last of what you'll need to make your escape: a handful of Snickers bars and a jar of peanuts, just in case. Plus some disposable razors. You stand in line and your eyes fall on a rack of postcards that, like most drugstore postcard racks, is occupied by several postcards that have nothing to do with where you are. One of them in particular catches your eye, and you buy that, too.
When you get home, your mother is asleep on the couch. You go into her bedroom and find her purse. She's gotten paid recently; you've been checking without success every night for a week, but tonight you come up with a handful of twenties. God only knows what she's using them for - the rent or something. You shove them in your pocket without counting them, but you think there's maybe two or three hundred dollars in there. She owes you that much, at least.
You get your backpack, the new red one, and you tiptoe out to the living room. You could stop to pull a blanket over your mother but you don't. You just stand there looking at her for a minute, and then you pull the door open and you walk away.
I rolled into town on the third of October, a crisp Saturday morning that found me bleary-eyed and yawning in a rear seat of a shuddering old Greyhound bus. I had boarded it two and a half hours earlier at a station in downtown Fresno and all the excitement and anticipation of the last few days had caught up with me. I must have been asleep in seconds, and I nearly missed seeing the skyline from afar.
When I woke I thought it was night. Staccato bursts of light punctured the darkness and in a panic I sat up, thinking I must have slept all the way through town, to wherever the bus was headed next - Portland, maybe, or back toward Fresno, awash in the lights scattered on the highway. I hadn't dared to believe that I would come this far, and I had been waiting for four days to make the sort of mistake that would put me in front of a desk at a police station trying to explain exactly what in the hell I thought I was doing, didn't I know kids got killed by doing this sort of thing. I thought of the postcard in my backpack that had seen months of wear in a span of less than a week, its corners soft and rounded, knowing that I would never compare it to the real, daytime skyline, knew that I was lost and hungry and felt my throat seize up in the indescribable, crippling devastation known only to suffering teenagers.
And then I sat up. In the same moment, the bus emerged from the tunnel and the view poured over me like a singing choir of angels.
It looked like a tiny island nation. I sat there, stunned, watching the seascape spread before me. Looking out that window was the closest thing to a religious experience I have had to this day. The water was the bluest I had ever seen and was penned in on all sides by great tall masses of land and dotted with watercraft. Sailboats tacked to and fro between clusters of city huddled at the waterline, and great fluffy clouds drifted bright and serene over it all. And ahead, the city itself, perched atop a hill, its buildings like kings, the tallest one puncturing the sky... I did not have words and I still don't. I simply stared, slack-jawed, and all the disappointment I was feeling melted into elation and hope and such emotion that I admit there might have been a moment of weakness where I had to wipe away a tear. It looked like a paradise stuck out in the middle of the ocean, temperate and beautiful, innocent of winter and sadness and trouble. I knew in that moment that I would be okay.
At street level the city was significantly more prosaic, but this did little to moderate my awe. I felt like a movie star as I got off the bus - it was a real beginning, the prologue to my new life. An abridged version of a Cranberries song ("Dreams," I thought) would overlay the noise of traffic and opening credits would fade in and out on the bottom of the screen. It felt about as genuine as a movie, too. I walked around in a daze of disbelief, staring up at the buildings, peering down alleys: This was it. I was here.
I had to sit down.
There was a Starbucks across the way, and I bought a hot chocolate and a muffin, and found a table near the window. Outside, Market Street rushed by on its Saturday morning errands, oblivious to the newcomer it had just absorbed. This was a city I intended to get lost in, and from all appearances it would not only allow that, but facilitate it.
I picked apart the muffin. Despite the careful planning that had gone into the journey here, my attentions had fallen short of my actual arrival. I had never expected to make it all the way without so much as a challenge, and subscribed to the common wisdom that it was best not to count one's chickens before they hatched; in other words, I had not dared to think about what to do past the bus trip lest I jinx myself. Well, I thought, the first order of business was obviously finding someplace safe to sleep and setting up camp, and then I could continue to explore and see what the city had to offer.
My lack of experience in big cities had ill-prepared me for what I found. I assumed there were any number of hidden nooks and corners for someone small to fall asleep in, but as I walked up Market Street, what little I found was terribly exposed. Like most girls, I'd been brought up to believe that everyone on the street wanted something from me and would not hesitate to take it by force. Now that I was unprotected by walls and locks, I wondered just how true that was and hoped that I wouldn't find out.
If there were secure spots to sleep in the city, at any rate, I wasn't finding them. As the afternoon wore on, my confidence began to wane, and at five o'clock, when the streets were clogged with cars and bicyclists, I sat down on the steps of a building and wondered what I had done.
