In my memory I ran alone, no classmates, cousins, or coaches nearby. Memories are like that, revealing some things while hiding others.

Ten years old—the day, hot and dry, like so many inland Southern California days—and already I realized the need to escape. I slouched among a restless bunch of kids gathered in the center of a shadeless dirt field. Our teacher introduced the middle school physical education coach and told us to listen up. The coach said he wanted to watch us run, that as of the fifth grade, we were all eligible to participate in the upcoming Junior Olympics. I missed most of what he said. As he talked, I lost myself in the heat of the field, drifting into listlessness, only coming back to focus on the appearance of the coach.

He was a large man with a round face. A brown mustache covered his mouth, and I wondered how he ate without getting food stuck in the wiry hairs. His t-shirt stretched around his midsection and showed moist armpit folds. Moles and skin tags freckled his neck and arms. His hat grabbed my attention; the logo showed bright, white letters against a blue background. LA—a Dodgers fan. I wondered how the students at our school could permit such a violation. I scanned my classmates to see if anyone else looked outraged at this treason. Looking around, I noticed the boys in my class were not wearing hats. This couldn’t be right. They usually wore hats, proudly displaying the mascot of the San Diego Padres, a swinging monk in brown robes. Was this a new trend, to not wear hats during physical education? I leaned over toward Billy Fraiser and whispered, “Where’s your hat?” He responded with a shush, not wanting to miss a word the coach said. I asked Erica behind me. “Why don’t the boys have their hats?” She leaned toward me and said, “This is important. Listen.” She nodded toward the coach, who was still droning on about school pride and athletic achievement. His neck moles glistened with new sweat.

I was still unaccustomed to many traditions at this new school, my third in three years. Each school had its rituals, trends, and fashions. I raced to keep up. We followed as the coach ushered us around the field, making notes on his clipboard as students participated in various events. Some kids slung heavy disks. Others ran and jumped, then measured where they landed. I had never been a track and field person, so I had no idea what any of our activities had to do with the Junior Olympics. Mostly, I sat and watched, getting hotter in my ditto jeans and long-sleeved yellow t-shirt. Erica participated in a short sprint but was fifth to four other girls. Billy Fraiser did something well—apparently—and a group gathered around him, clapping him on the back and congratulating him as he bent forward, hands on knees, and caught his breath. The coach handed him a permission slip and welcomed him to the team.

Within an hour or so, it seemed everyone had tried at least one event, but not me. Instead, I moved myself around, trying to stay inconspicuous. I listened. I watched. After an hour or so, I learned that baseball hats were not allowed in middle school (which is why the fifth-grade boys had ditched their caps) and that the Junior Olympics were a big deal for Santee Elementary. I didn’t know. I had only been attending Santee Elementary for a year. I kept my head down and stayed out of the way. Besides, I had enough going on back at home.

That year was the leanest I recalled of my childhood. My parents fought about money. I remembered not having groceries for long periods, eating what we could find or borrow, going to dinner at my grandma’s house. She made us faces on paper plates with mandarin orange eyes, canned meat cut into smiles, and cottage cheese hair. She had been sick much of the year, so it was good for us to visit—good for her to be with her active grandkids, and good for us, too. Grandma barely ate then, so she always had plenty of food to share. Earlier that year she fell and broke her hip, so she couldn’t get around. As a result, she spent most of her time on the couch. She still managed to tell us the best stories about her youth, about our uncle as a boy lost under the bed with spaghetti on his face, about our mom as a kid. Our grandma talked about her sister who died of tuberculosis, her time with the nuns, and the years she spent serving as a nurse in the Navy during World War II. She recalled the ports she visited. She always said she was proud of me for anything I had done—the best listener, always glassy-eyed with such contemplative wonder at my ramblings. She loved those many nights when her grandkids gathered around her couch, pillows and blankets strewn about the floor, taking in her words and her food, much-needed sustenance.

Other family members, too, became our greatest advocates during those lean times. We often pooled our resources with our adult cousins. One night my cousin, Jay, and his wife, Doreen, came for dinner. They brought what little food they had, and we shared what we could. I remembered him expressing his gratitude at the kitchen table as we ate, how he swallowed tears trying to articulate his appreciation at finally eating something hot, something besides ramen. I knew all about ramen, those dried noodle packets; I even had my favorite flavor: chicken. I liked to spread the hot noodles on buttered bread, if we had butter, if we had bread. I never thought of ramen as a poor person’s food. Then again, I never really thought we were poor. But I did remember selfishly sneaking bread into my room, hiding away behind my bed and savoring the solid bites of a single, extra slice, somehow more substantial than the slippery ramen noodles.

I did not want the kids at school to know that we didn’t have the things they did: Hostess snacks in their lunches and carrots peeled and cut into uniform sticks. Cookies and apples and melon balled into little treats. Instead, we had reduced-price lunch at school. I was embarrassed to pay my slim dime each day, or sometimes ten pennies. So, I ate alone and stayed out of the way. I did not invest much in the school because I did not want the school to invest in me. Besides, I would be gone soon. I often imagined I was a spy hired by the CIA to observe Santee Elementary from afar. I thought if I was approached by the KGB to be a double agent, I would agree only so I could report their operation back to the CIA and finally end the Cold War. I imagined some of my classmates were KGB, but mostly the boys. Some of the girls had been nice to me. Erica was friendly with me when I first moved to Santee, but once her dad became my math teacher, things changed. At Open House night, he interacted with my parents. From then on, I was no longer invited over after school. Erica stopped hanging out with me. She stayed friendly but never went out of her way to sit with me at lunch or ask me over. I thought I was fine with this arrangement. I thought I would be that kid who did her own thing, blended in, hid. I could be a secret agent like the best of them, never calling attention to myself.

And then, we ran that damned race.

The 400 meters was the last trial of the day. The coach gathered us all together as a big group again. He said, “Everyone has to participate in this last event.” He paused and then emphasized “This” when he said, “This is the 400 meters.” Two of the boys high-fived. I gave a withered look to Erica, and she whispered, “Just run as fast as you can for as long as you can.” Her words repeated in my mind.

As soon as the coach yelled, “Ready, set, go!” I took off. I thought about the F14s that buzzed over our schoolyard from Miramar Air Force Base not ten miles west. I imagined their sleek bodies slicing the air, and I ran as fast as I could, pumping my legs hard. Once up to speed, I became a steam engine train. My elbows slid back and forth, and my forearms thrust like the coupling rods of a locomotive’s wheels, pushing the machine forward, chugging along with might—unstoppable! I felt fast, even though I had never been a fast kid. When we played hide-n-seek in the vacant field, I was always slow to get to home base if I made it there at all. When we raced our bikes around the makeshift track, looping empty chemical barrels stacked among the sagebrush, I was always the last to finish. I usually found a daydream to guide me through any motion. But on that day, my daydreams conjured powerful devices mid-stride. My entire body ignited, and I ran with an unknown energy. To risk a cliché, I ran like my life depended on it. And maybe it did. Maybe my whole life—all ten years and three schools—had brought me to that moment to see what I could do.

My shoes gripped the gravel of decaying granite. The entire school was built upon a huge granite slab. The land once leveled—razed where the decay permitted scraping—made way for the plain stucco buildings constructed here and there. Nothing grew on its campus, through the thick rock. The area that gave way to the field was desolate and dry with a few chain-link backstops erected for baseball and kickball. We rounded these backstops as we ran.

I paid no attention to where I was in relation to my classmates; I only ran. My legs pushed, and my quads burned. My lungs felt like they were on fire, and my heartbeats surged. But something else happened then, too. With my attention on my body—heart beating, feet thumping—I forgot about my starving cousin, my sick grandma, my failing grades, and failed friendships. I only felt my body.

In the final stretch, all recognition of the schoolyard and my schoolmates faded away. I ran unaccompanied, detached from my world and the things that weighed me down. I noticed the ache in my legs and lungs, and I acknowledged it, used it even, to push myself harder and faster. A clear thought occurred to me: this effort would not kill me. There were things in my life that could kill me, but running wasn’t one of them. My lungs would not burst. My legs would not fail. I could feel the exertion in the pain, and I embraced the feeling, a hot ache that reverberated through my body with each stride.

The yelling of my classmates and the coach’s whistle brought me out of my trance. The race was over, but apparently, I had kept running and was rounding the first backstop again before I finally heard them. I was not the first kid to finish, but I had gone the farthest. Embarrassed at overshooting the finish line due to my distraction, I slumped back to the crowd.

I knew I was in for some endless teasing from my peers. My breathing heaved as I made my way toward my classmates, self-conscious and exhausted. They laughed and jeered, the way kids do when they’re relieved they aren’t the butt of a joke. I felt my skin hot on my face and getting hotter.

“Yellow shirt,” the coach barked above the din. I tried to swallow the dusty lining of my mouth as I walked toward him. “Here’s your permission slip,” he said. “Congratulations.”

The other students groaned and protested, but the coach shut them up with a quick blast from his whistle. “She ran through the finish line, which is what I want all of you to do. Don’t give up ten feet before the finish line… even if you’re ahead.” He shot a look at Billy Fraiser, then nodded at me.

I held that sheet of paper in my hand and looked at it, trying to comprehend what had just happened. Maybe I was in shock because I still could not believe the power I felt in my body as I ran, like nothing I had ever felt. Maybe the congratulations and admiration of my classmates—such a new experience—seemed harder to take. I wanted to experience more of those feelings.

I took that slip and gave it to my parents. I made them promise to take me to the Junior Olympics. I practiced; I ran in the vacant field every day, rounding the empty barrels and dumped debris, the same route we usually rode with our bikes. I ate my dreaded vegetables when we had them. I even drank a raw egg because I heard that’s what athletes do. I imagined what it would be like for a kid like me, shy and quiet and maybe poor, to get to participate in such an event.

And I would love to report that I went to the Junior Olympics and gave it my best. I would love to tell you that I went to the Junior Olympics and failed miserably, and the coach saw the error in his method of selection. I would even love to tell you that I sprained my ankle and could not compete. But the truth is, I didn’t go because my parents didn’t take me. They couldn’t take me. I could still hear Mom telling me we couldn’t go, but not offering a reason. I figured my parents just dropped the ball, like they had before.

It turned out, Mom could not tell me why because she could not find the words to say she had to go to the hospital instead to see her own mom die. My grandma had been hospitalized the day of the Junior Olympics, but I did not understand the gravity of her hospitalization. When I found out, I selfishly told my parents that my grandma would want me to run in that race. She would want me to try my best, and to tell her all about it after I competed. But I never had the chance to tell her that story. She died a few days later; her liver finally gave up, succumbing to the alcohol that kept her tethered to her couch all those years.

At her funeral a few days later, my cousin, Michael, told me we had killed her. It turned out, Michael knew something about our family history that I did not know: that many of us died of alcoholism with pickled livers and blown-up bellies, that we came from a long line of drunks, that this fate awaited us both. In a family like ours, we helped each other to this fate. We weren’t athletic people. We were drunks, broken and scared and hidden away in our self-loathing. We did not run like locomotives or fly like F14s; we drank ourselves into oblivion. We ran ourselves into the ground.

My grandma was an alcoholic. When she was sick on the couch, she was a very gruesome type of sick. When she listened to my stories and ideas, she was in her own kind of daze, maybe smitten with her granddaughter, sure, but maybe also drunk. When I remembered the plates of smiling fruits and veggies she made for us, I realized it was not her efforts that created those fun meals. By the time I was ten, my grandma had not been up from the couch in months, maybe years. Instead, my mom made the plates of food, recreated the faces for us and we sat on the carpet near our dying, drunk grandma and ate Spam cut into smiles. What my cousin, Michael, meant when he said we had killed her was that we had provided her booze. When she couldn’t get up, we brought her cans and bottles. I even learned to use a bottle opener sitting right alongside her on that couch, my feet not yet touching the carpet.

When I found out how my grandma died, I thought I had figured out something about grownups. The real reason that adults did not run became clear: they couldn’t run. Running was too optimistic. I always assumed adults did not run because they had forgotten how. But maybe grownups stopped running on purpose. Maybe each grownup made a deliberate choice to never run again, to keep their head down and move carefully through life with measured actions. Survival dictated this. Optimism was too risky.

I made a study of the movements of adults then, waiting for someone to prove me wrong, always watchful for a spontaneous adult to leap a snake or run a race, but the people I knew did not run. They could not. The act of running encroached on something they could no longer access, a fundamental kernel of truth about pain and struggle that came by circumstance and by choice. Like the ache in my legs, running seemed to acknowledge a joyful effort within the ache of living. An ache that knew hurt but pushed anyway, an ache that said I’m going to try as hard as I can, and it won’t kill me.

I learned then that we were a people burdened with too many ways to die. We had deep worries, worries which slowed our pace and mired our path in unfathomable grief. We worried about where we would get a next paycheck, a next meal, or a next drink. Running in the field across the street from my house divorced me from this kind of worry, offering a luxury of hope. Those long, carefree hours, where I spent the afternoons on my selfish endeavor to run in the Junior Olympics, were indulgent and extravagant.

Even though I saw my selfishness, I still felt angry at my grandma because her illness prevented me from running in the Junior Olympics. So, when Michael told me how she died, I died a little, too. My legs gave out below me and I buckled both physically and figuratively. Had we killed her? I knew I couldn’t answer that question then, scanning the crowd of grownups standing around in their funeral clothes, each with down-cast eyes and vacant stares. I knew they could not answer me either—it would be cruel to even ask. Mom, Dad, did I kill my grandma? Was the beer I gave her the one that did her in? Instead, I left my unasked questions there in the cemetery. Years passed before I would ask again. And years would pass longer still before I would run again.

I forgot running, the act of tearing away from that hot day, moving with swift purpose into oblivion. Each time I tucked myself away, to assuage my fear or hide my hurt, I forgot about the warm pain in my legs and lungs, skittering along the razed granite like a roadrunner kicking up puffs of dry silt. I forgot running down sandy paths lined with chaparral broom, sagebrush, and snakes. I gave up those memories when I questioned fate, challenged my lot in life, and dared to run. Eventually the memories of running slipped so far away I no longer fought the urge to run. Instead, I too, found my solace in a bottle where the colors of each recollection faded, the sharp edges of my life rounded out, the residual tone of every memory sank into a birthright of detachment until I forgot it all, forgot I could be so alive.