Gunnysack.

My heart is racing. Thumping. Jumping.

The sweat trickles down the nape of my neck. The droplets frolic down my face.

Deep breaths. Darting eyes.

My feet have grown accustomed to the repetitive beat they drum into the dirt. I can feel the friction under my arms as I wind down the uncomfortable road to chafing.

It’s been ten miles and I am invincible.

A bird flutters across my path and my first instinct, run faster.

Faster and faster, farther and farther. 

My best friend is a water bottle that is caught up in a custody battle between my right and left hand.

My coach is the wind that blows at my back, whispering in my ear that I am the captain of this vessel.

I am the captain and the dusty trails are my undercurrents, pulling, beckoning me into their infinite abyss.

I get lost in my brain when I’m running.  

I get lost in my brain and I like it. I love it. I live for these moments.

The moments I can escape. Escape the monotony and climb out of the proverbial box I’ve been shoved into. Stifled. Suffocated. Sanity seeping through the cracks.

My name is Sabrina McCarley and I live to run.

And here’s why.

I’m the product of what you might call a dysfunctional family. I hesitate to use the word dysfunctional considering it’s been cast about like a rag doll at a preschool. Everyone wants to claim it as their own, believing that having a dysfunctional family makes their story sit on a throne above the rest, which brings me to my point.

I’m the product of a dysfunctional family. A mother addicted to meth. A father addicted to alcohol. Dwelling in a world of physical, emotional, verbal, and sexual abuse, I became a recluse. Invisible to the world, invisible to my family, invisible to myself.

I always dreamed of running away.

But instead I escaped into books, stories that weren’t my own, lives that were happier, prettier, more delightful than mine.

And then I discovered that I really could run away. I ran away through the pages, devouring books as if there was a pending burn pile outside my bedroom door and I had to read them all before they were pried out of my hands and banned for all eternity, cast into the famished flames.

But then I discovered that I could physically run away everyday.

Run away but come back. Come back because I didn’t have the audacity to defy my parents, no matter how much I secretly wished that I did.

Running quickly became my outlet, hopping onto the list of solitary hobbies I recruited to hang out under my invisibility cloak.

And now at twenty-two, long after I have moved out from under my parents, I continue to run away. Everyday.

I am free. I am focused. I am thoughtful.

I imagine. I dream. I delight.

I conjure the grandest of schemes when I’m running, schemes to write a book of my own, schemes to climb mountains, schemes to change lives, schemes to save the world.

My latest scheme?

Run across America.

I have a dream that I will one day fly solo, sew some paper wings on my shoes, and run across my country, coast to coast.

And that’s where you come in dear reader. I’m presenting an opportunity to you and asking you to partner with me in this grand scheme.

It will be an epic adventure.

Care to run away with me?