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You’re always running, aren’t you, boy? Physically, if you can’t run mentally; mentally, if you can’t run physically. What are you running from?
River doesn’t know who the voice in his head belongs to.
What are you running from?
The past, the present, the future. Running is better than hiding, right? It means you’re actively doing something.
But is it really all that different? You’re still avoiding something, instead of facing it. Will running from it ever let you escape? Or will you simply go on, until one day you stumble, crash, and fall, and you can do nothing to keep it from swallowing you whole?
Will you ever be free?
He supposes he will—go on, that is—he can’t see how he would break the habit. It has always been his one solution to fall back on, no matter what the initial problem was. He doesn’t want to dwell on the last question.
As a child, escaping outside and disappearing into the sanctuary between old, lichen-covered tree trunks or into some field proved to help when expectations from teachers or his grandparents got too demanding, constricting him, crushing him beneath the weight. Not that they treated him poorly, but sometimes he needed to get away, away, away from the feeling of being squeezed into a mould that never quite fit.
When he was even younger, vivid daydreams of intricate scenarios playing out in fantastical worlds proved to be an effective shield against his mother’s angry or frustrated rants, whenever they would happen. Manoeuvring the at times unstable environment became much easier when he had the ability to just slip away for a while, until things calmed down again.
After arriving—being left behind, his brain unhelpfully reminds him—at his grandparent’s house, he vaguely remembers a hushed conversation between the adults, the memory murky due to him being half present, his mind on its way to somewhere else entirely.
His grandmother had said something he didn’t catch, gesturing discreetly in River’s direction with a concerned furrow between her brows.
“That? Oh, he does that sometimes,” his mother had answered. “Don’t worry about it, he tends to be less difficult that way anyway.”
He can’t remember, or didn’t catch what Rose replied at the time, but he remembers feeling her worried gaze on him from time to time in the years that followed.
***
As an adult, he doesn’t remember much from his time with Isobel, other than that they were on the move more often than not, but few actual memories. He heard somewhere that lacking childhood memories could be a sign of experiencing something traumatic at a young age, something about the brain blocking out bad experiences to protect itself—which may well have been the case, but he’s not traumatised, is he? Not now. He’s a functional adult. He just likes moving his body. Always has done.
He’s fine. Why wouldn’t he be? Like, people are supposed to know whether they’re traumatised or not, aren’t they?
After all, in the end it probably was for the better that Isobel left him with his grandparents, and they’d eventually come to love him, even if raising him wasn’t their choice initially. The point was: for the most part, he grew up loved. That has to count for something, right?
***
“Most people don’t start unravelling at the seams when being forced to sit in an office. You’re almost like a racehorse,” Louisa had told him once. An ex-racehorse, maybe. If he were a racehorse, maybe it would have been easier.
Unravelling at the seams may be strong wording, but lately, it had been difficult to get a break from reality, escaping into a world conjured by his imagination. Since his trip to France and everything that had come before and after it had uprooted just about everything in his life, turned it upside down, and shaken it vigorously, he couldn’t just slip away like he used to anymore, and it was starting to become a problem.
His body chained to the office chair—if not literally—and his mind chained to the rock that was the recent, gut-wrenching revelations about his family. A family he thought he knew. Everything dragging him deeper and deeper beneath the surface of a river no one seemed to notice he had fallen into, but that he was drowning in it all the same.
Now, with both his options to run removed—yes, he could admit to possibly having been unpleasant to be around at times, as of late.
“Like a horse kicking at the walls confining it,” Louisa had mused, gesturing to the way his leg was bouncing underneath his desk, poorly hid from other’s eyes.
A bit too true, River had thought, shamefully, as he recalled making Shirley flinch earlier because he’d closed a cupboard in the kitchen with a lot more force than strictly necessary.
What are you running from?
Others … himself, maybe.
***
That night, while lying in bed, staring at the glow from the streetlights in the ceiling, listening to the rain hammering against the window, he wonders if maybe the unthinkable has already happened, that he’s already lost his footing and come crashing to the ground, allowing everything chasing him to catch up.
Maybe he’s not fine after all. Maybe he never was. Could some part inside him have been broken all these years without him knowing?
Maybe he isn’t really running at all anymore, maybe it’s just his body that doesn’t know how to do anything else, so it just keeps going through the motions because of muscle memory alone, not noticing that he’s been lying face down in the dust for a long time. Like a machine falling over in a factory, without disconnecting from its power supply, continuing the motions it was programmed to do. Reduced to parts jerking chaotically in a heap on the floor, as if in a seizure, not noticing it’s just fucking everything up for everyone else. Making everything worse. Maybe it would be better for everyone if he just stopped too.
But how? Running is the only thing he knows.