We'd been talking about running away for a while. But it was always too big, too scary. We were always just a little too comfortable. And then one day, you had just had enough. I don't know if it was that one coworker whose white cis/het male privilege made it impossible for him to see you as his better, or the car breaking down again, or that the anti-trans laws had finally come to our state, probably all of it and more. To be honest, I'd been ready for this day for a long while. It always took you a little longer to reach your limit. You were so good at giving everyone but yourself the benefit of the doubt.
When you walked out the door that morning, heading to what would ultimately be your last moments with any other person besides me, I knew it was the end. I'd had the most incredible dream that night. We were wild cats, living the best lives I could have imagined, not easy, but so much less stressful than the realities of our last 20 years together. So when you came through the door early, throwing your keys across the room, uncharacteristically violent for you, and said flatly "It's time", I was not even a little surprised. I had already made my peace and started preparations.
The last couple of years had been so hard. Too much loss, far more than anyone should ever have to suffer. The way both of our families rallied around us after we lost the twins, we thought we’d always have their support. But time revealed the truth, that like so many of that generation, they loved money more than even their own children. Slowly but surely, then kind of all at once, we lost touch with all of them, and honestly considered it for the best. But fucking hell did it hurt. There may be no pain worse than isolation.
Running away from it all had never occurred to us until our friends Sam and Vanessa (the only friends we’d managed to make and hold on to) told us they had a plan. They'd worked out all the details. As a lesbian couple, they couldn't bare the thought of their marriage becoming illegal again, they wanted to be together more than they wanted anything society could offer them. One night, one of our board game hangs, they laid it all out for us. Vanessa had been learning how to improvise shelters and make a fire with whatever could be scrounged from different terrains, and Sam had been meeting up with a local foraging group for months. Together, they'd been pouring over maps of the region, creating and memorizing routes that would keep them the safest.
It had all started with a story Sam had heard on This American Life or something. A man had evaded arrest for 20 plus years by living in the woods and never staying in one place for more than a couple of nights in a row. And they thought they could do it too. So they had started saving up money so they could quite their jobs and maybe not raise too much suspicion. Slowly but surely, they cut contact with almost all of their friends and family. When they revealed their plan to us, Sam had just left her job "to focus on starting a family", and Vanessa told us she would be quitting hers in a couple of months. Then they would wait just long enough that people stopped checking in, and they were gone.
Sam and Vanessa had left almost two years ago to the day. Of course at first we had thought they were insane. We gave them a month at most before they were back, telling us how much harder it was out in the wild than they thought. But as life dragged on, now minus our only real friends, we wanted to go, we needed to go too. And now we were.
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