12 November 2019 • Victor J. Perez III - I

This essay was originally published February 19th, 2018 and was re-published in Malocclusion: A Post-Bimaxillary Osteotomy Nonfiction Journal, which can be found here

Running from friends. Running from life. Running from family. No matter where I go, I can’t escape. Running from anxiety. Running from reality. Running from my future career. I’ve never been much of an athlete. My legs and my lungs are always in competition of what will give first. Running from my desires, because I felt like I was never worth them. Running from my needs, because other peoples’ were more important. Running is pointless and exhausting. Trying to justify why you’re running is almost as bad as the act of running itself.

I feel like I’ve been running my whole life. I’ve run figuratively from many things. Trying to avoid my problems, hoping they would go away. That’s how I ended up in Morgantown, after all. The first time I ran away from home was at the greatest place on earth; Disney World. I was never a very calm child. What I craved most was excitement and thrills. My parents just wanted to take a nice picture in front of the flowers. Pictures ran very antithetical to what I craved as a child. They made me mad, and I loudly rebelled whenever they were taken. “Where are the roller coasters? I wanna ride the roller coasters,” I can imagine myself demanding loudly. Finally, I snapped. We were at a photo studio for all the Disney characters waiting in line to take a picture with Goofy. Can you imagine waiting in line for something that wasn’t a roller coaster? I was having none of that nonsense. My mother said something very poorly thought out in the moment: “If you don’t like it, you can just leave.” So I did. Eight year old me left his family and started wandering around in Epcot, one of the few Disney World parks without roller coasters, to find a roller coaster. Yet, I was a determined little child, and relentless in my unknowingly pointless search.

After around thirty minutes of limitless freedom, I saw a horri- fying sight: my aunt in a full speed sprint, high heels in hand. I tried running, but it was too late. She tackled me with full force, and started hitting and yelling at me for leaving and worrying my family. I don’t know what felt worse: the fact that all that running had been for nothing, or the high heels.