the runaway

          As far as what I found out, there are 3 of us. We were the experiment everyone had an idea existed, but never really knew anything about. All I know is there are 3. I’m not sure if there are still 3. I’m the only one among us I have the time as well as the care, really, to learn about. You’d expect that having ran away from home 3 years ago, I would have learned more than us being an experiment and how many we are. I expected that too, but the way I saw it, it was all I really needed to know.

          Growing up was, in a nutshell, normal; Normal house, normal town, normal school, normal people, normal everything. And by normal, I don’t mean completely fucked up; every god damn aspect of everything in my life before I ran away was totally normal. I never got into fights, never got bullied, never smoked, never got drunk, never got into a band, never snuck out in the middle of the night and never  hated my parents. Up until the time I ran away, I never experienced or even thought about trying any of these. Except of course the hating my parents bit.
          No, I’m not emo, and neither am I a rebel. Hating my parents was not and is not the result of some quarrel about allowance or low grades. It came about through a discovery of certain files that would explain why, growing up, everything was so fucking normal, which now is clear to me I should have noticed long ago, wasn’t right.
          It was entitled Paper Dolls, and they contained everything about the 3 of us. If I remember it right, the 3 of us were taken from birth and raised in completely different environments; controlled environments. We were 3 people made to grow up in the pattern chosen for us. Something like the Truman show, except there are 3 Trumans and not everyone knew about us.
          For as much as it had everything about me, everything I’ve been through, everywhere I’ve been, all the people I’ve met, and everything else about us from the past, present, and what it looked to be, the future, it never mentioned anything about our names. Where the name Paul Q was supposed to be, instead, there was the title: The Zephyr, and where the other’s names should have been, there were: The Girl, and The Hero. Knowing completely nothing about the other two, I supposed that Paper Dolls had The Girl’s and The Hero’s lives plotted out, because it had mine. I know because from my first words, to where I would be and what I would be doing a year from now, it was all there.

          I was pretty young when I discovered Paper Dolls, and being young, I wouldn’t blame myself for trying to forget about it after I read the whole thing. It was a pretty big fucking thing for a 15 year old to swallow, so I went through a couple weeks worth of denial until shit started happening that made denying harder than it already was. As I said, Paper Dolls contained everything about us; about me, and one thing of this everything that ultimately pushed me enough for me to want to do something was the fact that on my 16th birthday, all the gifts I got were exactly the things that were on a list on Paper Dolls entitled 16. That was it for me. It became really clear that shit wasn’t right, and a lot clearer was the fact that I was living this bullshit colorless life because people made it so. I wasn’t going to be an experiment anymore.

          Looking back, what I did was pretty lame, all I did, on the night of my 16th birthday, was runaway from home. I got up from my bed at about 11:45 pm, drank a glass of water and left.

          I’d just turned 19 that day when I decided to get back at them. I lived alone, I’d been in so many fights, I lost count, I smoked a pack a day, I was drunk everyday, I still hated the people that I grew up believing were my parents, and on that day, I was going to the house I grew up in and kill them. As corny as it was, doing it on the 3rd anniversary of the day I ran away from home; my birthday, was pretty appropriate on account that there were 3 of us. I don’t know, it made sense to me.
          I remember going up there at about midnight thinking them being asleep, smothering them would be easier than chasing them around the house and trying to catch them with my knife. I remember going to the window of my old room, which I knew didn’t close properly, sliding into the house, and waiting a couple minutes to steady myself for what I was about to do. It didn’t take long to convince myself that I was ready because after a couple minute’s worth of asking myself whether I was really going to do what I had planned on getting done, I found myself climbing the stairs and opening the door to my parent’s room.
          Of all the things I remember that night, opening the door was the clearest I could recall because as I did, I was greeted by an empty room, with a single piece of paper on the floor. It really doesn’t take a genius to realize that given everything that was on my mind that night, an empty room was pretty much the last fucking thing I expected, but looking back, I was actually kind of relieved that the room was empty because as much as I convinced myself that everything was perfect and that I was ready, I really wasn’t at all. I needed time to collect my thoughts and fully put my mind around just what was going on again anyway, so I figured picking up the piece of paper wouldn’t do any damage. I sat down, lit a cigarette, picked up the paper and started to read. It was pretty dark so I had to angle with the moon to get some light. I did, and in the faint light I caught I was able to read the title Paper Doll. Beneath it was a picture of me at 19, and beneath that, the title The Runaway. As I said, it was pretty dark, so I tried reading it again thinking maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, but it read the same, and the picture stayed a picture of me. I continued reading because there really wasn’t much left to read. The last thing on the sheet was “19: death by suicide.” I looked at it for a while, and laughed because I realized that aside from the piece of paper, the only other thing I was holding was a knife.