Run Away, With Me

Imre was always the strong one. He was always the one to stand up for what he believed and what was right. He never gave up on anything or anyone. Sometimes it seemed like he was losing his grip on his morals, but he always came back, he always did the right thing.

Imre Winstringham was the only person in the whole world that figured me out. He was the only one that understood me and sympathized with everything my life has become. He never judged me or made fun of me and he never expected what everyone else did. He expected nothing.

His name means strength, and I believe with my whole heart that he is the strongest person I have ever known. He’s the strongest person I’ll ever know.

He was strange, I’ll admit that. He wasn’t normal; he was special. He had a disease, a rare and unfortunate disease. He was sick, but he never showed it, never shared it. Imre Winstringham had a congenital insensitivity to pain.

His whole life he never knew what it was like to be cut; he never knew what it was like to be broken. It made him who he was: a fantastic and insightful individual. It made him a great athlete and it made him observant. He was wonderful. He was peaceful. He was brave.

It was hard for him when he moved to town. Not knowing who he could trust or who he could confide in threw him for a loop. No one wanted to be friends with the strange new kid from the east coast. In L.A, natives don’t always take too well to newcomers. When you live around people struggling, you learn to dislike the people that come to compete. Most of the families struggle, but some of us grow up privileged.

I was an outcast in the public school. My parents were rich, sisters talented, and future set up. But when I was born I didn’t have the outgoing attitude and the stereotypical good-looks. My mom had come from nothing and made her way to Hollywood and the big screen, but she was humble. Her dying wish was to see all of her daughters learn values and pride like she had; she wanted us to earn our places in the world. My father stuck to that---reluctantly---and sent us to public school.

Tess and Marie were inseparable, Tess older by nine months. The two of them were older than me by six years. Needless to say, they didn’t need another “BFF” to play dress up and dolls, especially one that wasn’t as pretty as them. They’ve made it together in the footsteps of our mother, actresses on the silver screen.

The only thing I had going for me was my brain. I was smart, musical, and driven to succeed. My grades were never a problem, straight “A”s and a perfect GPA. I was destined to graduate valedictorian and be sent off to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Brown. I was going to go somewhere and my dad was so, so proud. He had made it through the corporate type of life, a businessman in all forms of the word.

He wanted me to go places, to do what I had ultimately wanted to do. He loved me for it, loved me for being like him and being my own kind of special, not the pretty kind. I was like the “son he never had” because he wanted me to follow in his footsteps as Tess and Marie had followed in our mother’s.

For a long time, I thought that that was what I wanted. For seventeen and a half years I had driven myself to be a robot that obeyed everyone’s command, stayed up late finishing papers, had no friends, didn’t know what it was like to laugh, didn’t know how to feel.

But Imre Winstringham changed that. He opened my eyes and made me realize that there was more to life than text books and college degrees. He made me understand that there was no point on breathing if it wasn’t for myself. He taught me what it was like to love something. Not just something, someone.

My grades never slipped, my dad never knew. No one had any idea that I was changing and becoming someone new, someone wiser and more in tune with their soul. To the world I was the same person, but to him I was special. My own kind of special, not anyone else’s kind. Not even my father’s.

I loved him. I still love him. I’ll never stop loving him.

He came to my window one night, just like he had so many other times. The big house I lived in didn’t carry sound well and my father never knew. Only he and I knew what it was like to fall back on a mattress together and smile. Just Imre and me. Together we were perfect, I felt it. The two of us were special, he taught me that. But that night he wanted something else.

“Hey,” I had whispered happily, taking his hand as he stepped into my room. We smiled at each other for a moment, the moonlight making his eyes glitter like emeralds in the sun.

“Melia,” he started carefully, smile fading. My own symbol of joy dropped to the floor and I felt my heart wrench, worried that he was here to break it off. “Don’t frown,” he had laughed so sweetly, “I have an idea.”

For a moment, I just breathed in the night wind dancing through my thin curtains. I just watched him, his eyes searching for something in mine, beautiful face scrunched in thought. He took a step closer to me and tucked my let down hair behind my ear. The way his fingers brushed across my cheek made my stomach flutter. I loved him.

“Run away,” he said simply, then added (smiling), “with me.”

I blinked.

All sorts of things ran through my mind in that moment. Thoughts of where we would go, what my family would say, what his family would say, what people at school would say, who would miss us and who wouldn’t, why I should leave and why I shouldn’t, and most of all whether or not I could live with him.

Imre was a smoker. Practically a pack a day, and I hated the way it tasted. Could I live with that? Of course. I loved him.

“Yes,” I breathed, mind made up.

It was that simple. I loved him and I was willing to throw away everything for him. He and I were meant to be, I knew it. He and I were going to run away and be ourselves and live our lives and be free from whatever crap people had to say.

So he kissed me and we did what we always did when he came in the night. We promised we’d leave early the next morning before anyone woke up. We’d be out of the city by the time they’d realize we were gone. And when we got to wherever we were headed, we would find a phone and tell them we were sorry and alright. They would understand then. When they learned why we had left, they would understand.

Three in the morning came along quickly. He helped me shove clothes and a few keepsakes into a duffle bag before we crawled out of my room through the window and climbed down to the ground. Imre had already packed his bag, confident I would say yes. And he was smart enough to park far enough away so that when he started the car it wouldn’t wake my dad.

We were half way to his beat up old Toyota when I realized I’d forgotten my necklace. My mother had given it to me before she died and there was no way I could leave it behind, so I started to turn back, but he stopped me. He told me to go to the car and start it and that he would get it for me. I did as he said and waited in his dirty old truck that smelled like crappy evergreen air fresheners.

And I waited and waited and waited and waited and waited.

But he never came.

At first I panicked and thought maybe he decided to leave me and go off somewhere else, but then I worried that maybe he’d been caught. So I turned off the truck and got out and cautiously made my way back to my house.

The first thing I saw were the flashing lights. Then I saw the neighbors and then I saw my dad, sitting in the back of a police car. I figured it out. My dad found Imre and shot him. It wasn’t accidental and it wasn’t for protection. My own father killed the love of my life because he was going to take me away; Imre was going to ruin my dad’s dream of having me turn out like he had. He couldn’t live with it.

I cried for a long time. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in tears because I don’t know what to do without him. For awhile I was convinced he’d come back and he was just sick, but I came around. I woke up and realized, looking down into the white expanse of a porcelain toilet bowl beneath my fingertips that I had something to live for. I still had a part of him.

I’m going to name her Fila. It means “to love strength”.

Sometimes, late at night, I wander off to the road we would have taken out of town and sit next to it in the warm dirt. The headlights hurt my eyes, but with my hands on my stomach I think about him. I think about what we would have been together if he’d have made it. I think about where we might have gone and how he would have smiled when we found out about a baby. I think about how we would have struggled a little, but it would have been worth it, and how we would have loved each other forever. I think about all of the other kids we would have had and maybe a dog. I think about everything that would have been.

Then the tears come and I come back to reality. When that happens I think about how hard it’s going to be when I go to college. I have to go to college for me, for us. I think about how hard it’s going to be without him. But then I remember that I have his family, his wonderful family. And then I remember how I have a future and I’m going to be happy. I remember what it was like to hold him.

I know I’ll never regret her, but I know, too, that now I’m the one that has to be strong.

Imre was always the strong one, but now I’m strong too.