the trapeze act was wonderful.

Best Friend smirked through sips of his overpriced latte, "What Aubrey, are you running away from home?"

Maybe, I thought. Probably.

But I always imagined runaways as orphans or hobos with their possessions tied up with a handkerchief on a stick, walking down dusty railroad tracks into the sunset. I, however, drove through the rain in a little red car that gets surprisingly good gas mileage, sipping Arizona green tea and listening to the only, albeit static-y, English-speaking radio station in all of Central California. I'm certainly not a hobo or an angsty teenager, and I'm definitely not running away glamorously like my favorite heroines, Lady Brett Ashley or Holly Golightly. I'm shooting for somewhere in between.

And there's a boy back home telling me that my problems are not geographical. Believe me, I know. The shadows follow even when the sun isn't out, no matter where the closet is mine always has skeletons in it and my hair is just big enough to keep all my secrets. But in that car I was feeling so relateable; like Nellie, just a bird who always flies away. And if Celine can drive all night to get to you, then why couldn't I?

Truth was, I was running away. Away from the stack of bills on my desk, the unopened emails in my folder and the exhaustion that never seems to leave even if I sleep an eternity. Listening to Bon Iver on repeat and eating dark chocolate bon bons in bed can only get a girl so far. Teary phone calls with LA and crying because the sky is so beautiful from the top of the hiking mountain, what is my life?

And I have issues with the way people use the term "home." Like it's always supposed to be at the place you last left it. So I make a spectacle of myself in global perspectives class and tell the lecture hall I am not a "global soul" because my home is between the cracks and one really has to squint to see it close. And now, because of all this, I tell Best Friend that I am just running from a place (my problems) because my home (my sanity) maybe does not exist or is running from me.

If you have ever tried to catch a feather in the wind, you will know this is no easy feat.