Fugitive

Sometimes places evoke powerful emotions.

There is a bus stop on Hill Street that makes my mind suddenly leap back five years of my life. The bus stop is in the middle of nowhere, in between places of importance, in front of an empty field. If you were to plot the bus stop on a bus route, it would be the blue line joining the dots – nameless and unimportant, the epitome of ubiquity.

It was night. I was still together with my ex-boyfriend at the point and I forget if it was a weekday or a weekend, if we had dinner or not, if we had arranged to meet, or how the terrible fight began.

We were in a dark alley behind a building where delivery trucks unloaded their goods. No one was around. We fought, word for word, will against will, straining to find a compromise but finding that we were as fire and ice. We fought until I felt my insides churn inside me and I felt sick to the stomach, filled with an irresistible urge to run away. Before I knew it, I had said “bye”, turned my back on him and walked away in a motion swift and final.

I started running. Into the building, up the escalators, through the corridors. There was no one in the building either – it was too late – the escalators were frozen, the shutters showing their dead eyes to the cold white light of the corridors – only a security guard at the ground floor watching guard.

I ran and I ran and I ran, translating into motion what I felt so keenly in my heart. Pulling away until I could breathe on my own again; yet I knew at the back of my mind that he had followed. I took the lift to a random floor, turned out and saw him. I tried to run away but he caught me roughly and asked me angrily why I was running away. I didn’t know what to say.

I was trapped.

I walked with him to the bus stop, both of us exhausted from fighting. We sat there looking at the buses go by, staring at the colourful windows of the building across the street shrouded by night, mocking us about a time not too long ago when things were not like this.

I looked at him, sitting there with his head hanging, and pitied him. I knew I had the power to make it alright – it was simply a matter of whether I was willing to give up what I wanted. I looked at him and asked if he was hungry and offered him a squished three day old tuna sandwich from my bag. He smiled slightly and ate it. We went home quiet, saving the fight for another day.

In some ways, I have not stopped running. In some ways, I still fear, the way a fugitive fears, capture.