After I left my place, I ran, crying the whole time. I took my phone but already planned to throw it in a river or something and buy a flip phone. But I needed to call my friends from the next city over. She promised she’d always come get me if I finally ran away. She knew about my abuse and offered to take me in several times but that would get her in trouble if she was caught to I always declined and told her I’d make it to when I turned 18 and could legally do it.
Well, I’m 16. So close enough. I already started texting her telling her not to ask questions but that I finally ran and needed her to get my far away from where I was. I had to break day break and they realized I didn’t go to class ‘cause my school will be calling them by 8:00 am to ask if I’m sick. It’s 2:23 am. Yet somehow, she’s awake and spamming my phone with countless text if I’m okay. Of course I’m not okay, that’s why I’ve ran away from home and need to get far away. But she was getting ready and getting in her car when she called me for a more detailed explanation but I forced her to settle for a conversation in the car not now.
So I ran, ran hard and long towards the next local district to mine, just trying to put distance away from my house and I. It was cold out cause I live in Minnesota and it’s close to winter time. So long story short, my friend found me. I got in her car and I remember how silent it was when she got to see my face and how broken I looked. But I still grinned. I was free.
So time skip to about the morning after. She got me cleaned up, helped me sort my things out and we talked long and hard. She may have been 2 years older than me, but she still lived with her parents. We had to tell them that by law I was technically kidnapped and they were hiding me. But somehow they agreed and I cried hard that day. These people were going to protect me and not turn me into the police, even if it got them in trouble. Her mom fixed up my face and for the next three days I slept. I just slept, I don’t remember waking up much because the internal struggle was at its prime. I finally had to realize what I had just done. On day four, there were a couple reports on me being missing but it was only a couple days and I was being depicted as a druggy. So they expected me to return soon. Ha. Not happening.
So I ended up dying my hair from blond to brown, it looked pretty cool and I cut it during a panic attack so now it’s short and to my ears. The search went on and on and after a month passed, I was the main story on channel 5 news. People from my school begging me to come home and how they missed me. I got rid of my phone and laid low. But I needed to start over. Restart my whole life and make it better. So this is where my paperwork that I stole from my family comes in.
I spent months trying to fake a new I.D. I started by making a fake copy of a birth record of the new name I picked and then I went to a DMV and got my license all over again. The fake birth record got me back into a high school where I decided to be on the safe side to dress more like a guy and avoid attention. It worked. Most people didn’t realize I was a girl for most of the time. I had no real friends and got decent grades. Just average. I was following a lot of movie logic on how to interact while being under like witness protection or something. Which is where I got a lot of my ideas from. And some of that movie logic really worked.
There was a local mom and pop kind of store and they didn’t require much for me to start working the counter and restocking. They never really suspect anything out of me. The hard part was remembering to keep my lie going on who I was. This is just how I survived. I worked every single day, refused days off and worked as hard as i could. I had bigger plans and needed the money. I needed to be able to support myself.
My best friend who was now my ‘cousin’ always worried over me. Said I worked far too much and that I didn’t need to work this hard. I had some sort of PTSD so I’d forget where I was and start to panic. I also had nightmares and scream during the nights. We had to turn off the tv if my missing ad showed up or else I’d started freaking out and lose control over myself again. And after my coma like sleep for 3 days, I stopped eating food and wouldn’t speak. I went into a terrible depression that I didn’t come out of for at least 2 months. Yeah, I’m a great roommate. But they still put up with me for everything I did. And still seemed to care for me.
You know, most people would consider the family that saved my life as my new family. I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t. Family was a forbidden thing to me and scared me like nothing else. While my dad is the devil to me, family was something I couldn’t accept yet. I loved them so dearly but I just wasn’t ready to call them family. I think I hurt their feelings at times with how I’d shut off if they tried to hint at it, but they really understood what a tainted word that became to me. I was forever grateful for this.
Okay, okay, so you’ve got the whole idea of my past. What made me run away, how I got away, where I went afterwards, how stealing my birth records did anything for me and all that crap. You all understand how I’ve managed to survive and how I now have a 50 sum year old boss named Hazel and how at school no one thinks I’m a girl and how I’m leaving under a false identity. These was only half the first half of my settling. Of course, there many times where I had to hide because cops were around, constantly had to redye my hair, dyed it all sorts of weird colors and for some reason I always kept my hair short. I think I looked too much like my old self to grow it out. I even started working out and dropped a whole bunch of weight to help slim down my face to make it hard to tell me from the old me. Now let’s get you caught up to more present me. I’ll tell it kinda memoir style my dears.