This wasn’t an exercise in running away, he didn’t think. It was more like closing his eyes and allowing himself to be led far—like curling up in a ball and letting your dad carry you home over his shoulder, awake with your eyes closed.

He met them in the mall; they followed him to the car. They asked him what he liked. He said he liked to draw. They told him they’d pay him to draw, teach him about it, and make him a hero. There was a lot of paperwork, though. He had never even registered to vote.

Instead, he wrote Mett. He wrote it above buildings and the streetlamps of a desolate city. He wrote it under windows and under the sky that shined his only light. He wrote it late at night, after his girl went to sleep, after they fought, and walked in two circular paths around the city as if he were pacing. He walked with a duffel bag as if he expected it to keep him warm, tucked under his arm. That was summer, but this was winter.

Before he left, he was given a small turquoise box through the mail and felt distant. It was from Tiffany’s and he’d seen the original gift around his girlfriend’s neck a hundred times. The box contained a gift from her father, but this was different. Inside were a dozen plastic stars that invited a necklace that hadn’t been made. They sat loose, cushioned by white felt, shuffled by the post office, and became the warmth he held to at night. He had taken to sleeping with them, still in the box, clenched in his fist like a wad of crumpled bills.

They were her, the girl he left, her father’s daughter.

At the time, being honest with himself, he’d say he wanted to run away. Run in any direction, thinking they were all alike. You get on freight trains because you expect to wake up in the morning in a completely different place. The train stops in the station, you jump out with your stick and bandana, and you’re a new person. Only it was like trying to get lost in the woods in back of your house.

The Army shipped him to Iraq as fast as they could. It was perhaps the most guided, efficient trip he’d ever taken, and he knew where he was going. Only once he’d arrived, his stomach was in his throat and he was farther from home than he’d ever been—ever wanted.

When he slept, he dreamt of climbing ladders to the tops of houses, the noise of cans echoing from his duffel bag. Then he awoke in a mess of bales of hay and produce, his neck and back drowning in sweat from a night on the floor of a freight train. He pulled himself up the iron bars of the boxcar to peer out the door. Between thinking about why train cars are always open and why he was always out of breath, he would wake up again.

This time it was on a cot, and he was again out of breath, opening his eyes as if by accident and wanting only to keep them shut. When he could think, he thought of reasons why he was there.

He had spent a week calling her before he left. She never picked up, so he looked forward to showering. He would imagine her and shake and fantasize about affecting her. I only think about you just before I come, when I’m choking you. He turned off the water and exhaled, then dried himself off.

So, it was spite, and only made sense to him, at the time, to run away, across the ocean, to fight someone he didn’t know.

He went to the mall because he knew they’d be there, in uniform. It was the quick, faked panic before you dye your hair. It was the sober night you were “too drunk to remember.” He set up his own recruitment—even shaved his head before he’d gotten there.

Before it ended, weeks before, she waited up at night in his bed until morning when he came home and she kissed his fingers. They would lie and be sick together as mice ran inside the mattress. They were cold together, but too tired to be apart. They promised themselves they’d never leave that bed again, but never aloud, wishing quietly for a way out. This was the bulk of what they both had.

Now, in a tent on his back, he held it tightly. He forgot what happened before he left, not because he had to, but to fool himself into believing he still had control over something he’d lost. He held it because he didn’t bring photographs. He held it because he had no phone and no paper or music to convince him of anything. He held it to be un-alone.

If this is about anything, he thought, it’s about being lonely and cold and sick to your stomach because you’re somewhere you’ve never been. It’s about control and self-doubt and disbelief. It’s about revenge and spite and, mostly, being lost. All those times you wanted to run away from home as a kid are gone. Now, still running, into nothing.