Day 1

A letter from the hideout.

The Tiny House Runaway

Day 1

04/21/2021

 

“I didn't know whether to duck or to run, so I ran.”

-Bob Dylan

 

They say isolation is medicine for the soul. I don’t know who they are, and I’m not sure they said anything at all about isolation, but I find it to be true. Sometimes, you merely need to run away from your life to a place out in the middle of the hills where the only outside lights are the stars. You can’t hear the endless hum of cars, and there is no one around. Sometimes, you need to run away.

                I am at this place as I write this letter to you. I’m here alone with the wind kissing the trees and the music of me typing. My back is killing me because I messed it up somehow, and I’m wearing this old tatter hoodie that I cut holes in the shelves for my thumbs. It is something I would do in high school all the time. I want to splash some bright red paint across the back of the hoodie for some wicked effect. I have been thinking about it for a while but have been too lazy to buy the paint.

                Why? I don’t know. Does it matter why?

                I guess the actual question you are asking yourself is, what am I running away from? You can’t be a runway if you don’t have something to run away from.

                A lot … is what I want to say, but maybe, the pen will get us to a better place.

                I have been told I’ve been on edge the last few weeks, and they are right. There has been this knot of emotions in my chest for those days. The knot tights around everything in me, reaching up to my skull, but the thing which bothers me the most is I can’t find a reason for the knot. Or a better way of understanding the knot is I feel as if something bad is about to happen.

                I can almost taste it in the wind.

                A pure hum of doom echoing from nowhere is all my soul fill these days. This doom song seems to play a lot around my birthday. I will be thirty-three in about nine days. The number doesn’t hold any weight against me, but it is coming. The only thing which this means is I have to look back at my life and forward to some future.

                I once had a friend tell me she didn’t do the whole New Years' reflects joke because your New Year is your birthday. I never agreed or disagreed with her, but it does seem the idea has wormed its way into my thoughts without me knowing.

                I am looking back at where I came in the hopes of where I am going.

                Tomorrow is coming much like the rain about to fall. There is no stopping it, so there is no reason to fear it. I try not to fear it, and it is not tomorrow itself, I fear. What I fear about tomorrow is it will be exactly like today.

                Nothing changed.

                And if life has taught me anything, normally, a big change is bad. Your back hurting to the point of never being the same again. Your lover is breaking up with you to the point you might as well be dead to them. Your once best friend is casting you out because God forbid you have political differences. Or you know, someone dies.

                Yup, change might happen, but it is not always for the better, I have found.

                However, this is not the change I am fearing? Struggling with? Ah, Hell, I don’t know what to call it, but it is not sitting right with me.

                You see, as a high school dropout, something I do greatly regret and also have a bit of shame about, I’m always trying to live up to this idea of who I was meant to be before I took too many pills to finish school. I sometimes wonder if the man I am now is not the man I was meant to be before a foolish action.

                Yeah, yeah, I know, you can’t change the past. Jay Gatsby tried only to end up swimming in the deep end of his blood. Isn't the moral of the story to use your pool before the end of summer? It is what I got it as the moral anyone else?

                I have been swimming in the idea of what I want tomorrow to be like, and by tomorrow, I mean years from now. The problem, one which I have always had, is how to get from here to there. I don’t see the path. I don’t even see the how right now. All I see is tomorrow will be today. It is the same as it is with all the emotional pits, downfalls, and dreaming of better things to come.

                I look around at my life. Bad? No, it could be worse. I have lived thought worse, done worse, but most all, I know people who have it way worse than me. So, no, my life is not bad, but is it what I want? I’m not sure I can say yes. (Not yet anyway.)

                Look, my cool cat reader, there are many blessing dancing in my life. My relationship with my family, golden. Friends? I’ve got my group who been in my life for twenty-some years. You can’t beat a friend who is always there for you when things go wrong and when things go right. My mind is good, the stories are flowing, and the best thing is I get to write every day of this life. I don’t miss a beat. There isn’t a day I’m not thinking about picking up the pen or working on a story, or building a new outline.

                I’ve got good things, like my dogs.  

And my motorcycle, which I’m still learning to ride. 

                Which makes the dread of my roots that much harder to deal with when I have to face them in my waking moments. I was told I was dumb and stupid when I was in second grade by a teacher; those words have impacted my life like a bullet to the chest. I dropped out of high school, which only made the wound grew into a pit where I fell in. I’m not dumb. I’m not stupid.

                I know these things and if you want to know them, then let’ get coffee while rapping about the meaning of life, death, and God. I’ll blow your mind. Bang. Bang. Your bang dead.

                I got it, save your flattery and praises. I don’t need them. I don’t want them. What I want is to be raw, truthful with you, let all this stuff inside me free for a brief second worth of ink. Over the next few days, hopefully, five, I’ll be writing to you about what’s kicking in this head of mine. Some of it will be landmines; rough, hard, but I pray you to see the hope in all.

                There is hope in me. Sometimes, it is buried deep under all the s**t and grime of my inner self, but it is there. I know it because I have stepped outside to breathe in the chill air, looking upwards at the stars. If those tiny dudes can burn all night in the void of nothingness to wink hope at us, then I can dig out mine for a bit. I’m not sure how these things are going to play out over the next few days. All I can hope is you tag along for a bit.

 

With a tip of the hat,

Chase

 

P.S. I’m not going to say where this tiny house is if you know, you know, but for this little writing gig, it’s a hidden place for me. You don’t say where you are running away, too that how people find you.