maybe running away isn't the term for what i did.
i didn't run at all. i had already been gone the first time - i had been dropped off, in fact, by my mother. from that point, it was just a matter of staying in the little room with the old table that had heard all our secrets over the winter, until it closed and my friend offered me a spare room. they called it a 'peer' group, because 'youth' group was too religious (and god knows we didn't need any more of that), and 'support' group was too correct.
the old table tasted my tears that night, one out of four phones missing from its surface, and along with it a myriad of secrets - like the little flags in my bio, like the love of my life and the little flags she hadn't put in hers, like the deep thoughts and the 'i love you's and the 'someday it'll be okay's we shared while i spent a hundred nights shaking and breathless, head under the covers, brightness never low enough, my mother's footsteps downstairs, coming upstairs, cracking and sighing as i'm praying and praying, 'please god don't let her know i have a phone', 'please god don't let her know i have a girlfriend', 'please god don't let her know i have a self' - please, god, don't let my mother see the myriad of secrets in the phone missing from the old table.
i told my 'peers', if 'peers' meant 'family', how she'd forced me to write down my password. i shook a little more than usual when she asked me this time if i'd contacted anyone on her blacklist - which happened to be mostly the same as my list of people who loved me. my poker face dissolved; i don't think i ever really had one. i think she knew the whole time. mothers move in mysterious ways.
i was 18. my peer-family told me, in exchange for the tears on the old table, that i'd been stolen from. i hadn't even considered that; if your homeland is ruled by a tyrant, to whom do you report a crime?
i learned that when you overcome the fear of it all, you report it to yourself. you create your own homeland.
i didn't run away the first time. really, i just stayed home.
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part one of a series (?) all about my leaving home
First of all, I really like the choice to write all in lowercase and not use capital letters. It makes it feel more emotional and desperate, really highlighting the panic and claustrophobia of running away and ending up in a group home like this. I assume this is you writing from experience, and I can really feel the emotion running throughout the whole piece. The very long, run-on sentences do a good job of showing how you, or this narrator version of you, might have been thinking- thoughts racing fast, etc. Still, especially that second long paragraph, I would try to break it up into at least two separate sentences just to make the flow a little better.
One of my favourite lines is ''please god don't let her know i have a self'' which is just devastatingly beautiful, and captures that feeling of a family who don't, or won't, accept you for who you are. It escalates the worry from something concrete, like having a phone, to something existential.
Putting 'peer' and 'youth' etc in quotes was a great touch; I wonder if you could play more into this and come up with new terms that you also put in quotes, if that makes sense, rather than reusing the same ones.
Overall, this is a beautifully written piece, and if true, I hope you are in a better place now. You are a very talented writer and able to capture emotions through syntax and grammatical choices <3
thank you so much for the review! it is from experience, yes, but i have my own place now <3 im honored you enjoyed the piece :]