Girl Who Runs

When the girl was ten, they went out on the boat. Before that, they had never owned a boat before, and the very first time that they took it out on the sea, her father nearly sank the whole damned thing to the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. But eventually, the vessel floated itself out into the middle of the murky, muddied water and fell into a liquid hibernation — the way that even you do whenever you take a long, hot bath in the winter and eventually you find yourself prune-like and only partially awake and aware of what’s happening around you. Nothing is for certain, but you are submerged in some version of thing you might label as sleep.

This girl and her family went out on the boat during that summer and the next, driving the winding, car-sickening three hours to the coastline where the only sound they could hear was the bumping of sailboats in the marina and the squalor of seagulls, demanding to be heard. When they would finally arrive, it would be close to lunchtime. The girl and her sister would sit on the one of the docks their feet pulled in close, hugging their knees to their chests, peering over into the watery depths below. They would sit and look for something — anything — to rear its head from the surface and look up at them: any indication that even below, too, life could exist.

The sisters sat there, watching their father untether the boat. They observed him untying the thick knots that now hung heavily, weighed down by the past three weeks, since the last time that they had all decided to come here. The rope had been stained with rain, worn down by wind, weathered down by the neglect of a family too busy to tend to it.

The younger of the two eventually stood up, in topes of climbing into the boat where cold lemonade lay nestled in a cooler filled with ice cubes. But this girl sat there on the dock, long after the boat had been untied and the sun had climbed into the sky. They had to call out to her — once, twice, a third time.

What was this girl thinking, all alone there on the edge of the Bay? She wasn’t thinking at all. She was dreaming. Of all the places that she will run to. The shore that was so far away that she couldn’t even see it from here: all the inlets that had yet to be claimed, the hidden coves that had yet to be discovered, the caves ripe for the taking.

She wants to be everywhere, all at once — just so long as as all the places are the ones that she hasn’t been to yet.

The girl finally climbs into the boat, much to the dismay of her mother who has been asking everyone to help her make sandwiches before the cheese gets soft and dewey from being left out in the summer sun. They all sit in a circle, passing around a jar of jam and a stick of butter, each person dutifully spreading and folding, smoothing and slicing the cracked wheat bread.

Then they are alone. This family, in the middle of the water, with no one but the fish beneath them to keep them company. They look out at the bridge in the distance, over at the highways that zigzag up the corridor along the shoreline, down at the wake of a jetski on the other side of a buoy playfully bouncing up beside them: evidence that someone out there also thinks that they are equally as alone, just like them.

For ten minutes, they quietly sit and eat their lunches, each person looking out in a different direction. And again, the girl begins to dream. She isn’t here. Not really.

She has already started to run.

Jump off the edge of this boat — sandwich in one hand, all her hope in the other — and dive down below the surface where no one can see her. Climb up onto the muddy beach, and start through the woods. A slow jog at first, but then picking up the pace until she’s at a gallop, and in an open meadow. Past the swamps near the bay, until suddenly she will find herself surrounded by open sky. Through farmland, past haystacks and grazing cows, until the sound of petulant seagulls is nowhere to be heard.

The girl sits on the edge of the boat and closes her eyes. The summer sunshine rains down on the open water, with no trees around to shade anyone from the June heat. So instead, she imagines herself running through the night, the moon high in the sky, casting shadows on the evergreens around her, making them seem larger than they could ever be.

She runs until she can’t see where it was that she started from. No hint of the bay, those inlets, or any sandy beaches with Blue Herons flying nearby. And somehow, between the forests and fields, through the rivers and lakes, the girl starts to grow up. She begins to forget about that boat in the middle of the water and the little girl on the dock who used to dream of touching all the things that she wasn’t yet tall enough to see.

Now, the girl who runs does so just so that she might one day find all the places she couldn’t even imagine — places that a little girl on a dock can’t even dare to dream about. When she runs through valleys, the mountains that surround her are taller than ones she has ever seen before; the forests with trees towering over her like monsters she knew once before.

Yet this girl is not afraid. She has passed by roaring rapids and screaming waterfalls. Instead, she keeps on running. Towards or away from something: no one can really be sure of which.