Not All Leaving is Running Away. Sometimes It's Just Leaving.

 I spent years thinking that I had run away from my small town in North Dakota. Not just the small town but the entire state. I always felt trapped and limited in that town of roughly 1200 people. I saw many of the people from classes before me, many never made it out of a 200-mile radius of that small town. All doomed to take over family farms, or work in the nearest city, dreams limited to the confines of what the flat side of North Dakota could provide them. I was desperate to see the world, the world that existed in my books, I was hungry for adventure and desperate to escape the depressing life that awaited me if I stayed. In 2005 I ran away the only way I could afford to, by enlisting in the military. 

It wasn't until today, when I was reading the book Mercury by Amy Jo Burns, that I realized I hadn't run away...I had simply left and never looked back.