## One

The first time I remember running away I was four years old. I wanted something - I don’t recall what - and my mother had responded with my favorite word.

“No.”

I was filled with an immediate and unrelenting rage. My mother looked up from her desk, eyes widening as she took in my expression and then I screamed.

“Sky!” My mother called as she tripped attempting to stand. Her voice sounded so far away and garbled. As though it was coming through a wall of water.

The scream was unending. It had taken hold and now it and the rage had control and I was trapped. I had to break free. So I ran.

I ran down the stairs of our new house, threw open the front door, down the porch stairs and away. I gave no thought to where I was running, I just knew that with every step forward in the fresh air loosened the vice like grip the rage had on me.

At some point the screaming stopped and a while later I found that I felt lighter and came to a stop.

I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t recognize any of the houses around me. I spotted an apple tree on a lawn and - suddenly feeling hungry - I went to it, picked an apple and sat beneath the tree’s branches to eat my snack.

Years later I would listen to my mother tell the story of that day. How she searched the neighborhood frantically and was finally waved down by someone who had caught sight of a little boy they didn’t know sitting in someone’s yard just down the block from our new home. How she found me asleep under the tree with tear stained cheeks and a half eaten apple beside me. How she took me home and I slept until almost noon the next day. How that was the start of a pattern of what my therapist calls “elopement”, but really just means that when I get really anxious or overwhelmed I run away.

What no one has ever understood is that that day I glimpsed something when I was running away. It could have been my imagination, but it looked like another world and to my overwhelmed young mind it felt alot like freedom.

Next Chapter: Two