Running To The Green Light

'Red to amber to green and I'm off'. I've imagined this moment for as long as I can remember; for years this idea is what has kept me going through the Hell that has been my life. I grew up in a stuck-in-it's-ways, close-minded community with my mother who, having had me at just 20, had always resented the years of youth I took from her. Her husband, and my father, had fled the scene immediately upon learning of the pregnancy; which had entrenched a deep distrust of men in her. Even as a teenager, I was forbidden from speaking to men, let alone allowed to have one round the house. Throughout my childhood, she ruled over me with an iron-fist; my internet access was severely restricted and my every search was monitored, my room was locked from the outside every night from sunset and I was never allowed a mobile phone; only permitted to use the landline in the kitchen - and only permitted to do so under supervision.

If my mother's strict discipline came from a place of love and care, such was never apparent in the way she treated me; she treated me as a nuisance and always seemed more interested in controlling me than caring for me. As a young child she would often forget to make me dinner and I, growing ever hungry and wearier, would have to sheepishly remind her. By the age of ten, I was expected to make all my own meals - and often, hers as well - and I had to be damn sure not to burn them, otherwise, I could be sure of a whooping.

Where I lived, corporal punishment hadn't fallen out of fashion in the same way it had in most places, but still my mother's use of it felt excessive even by local standards. I remember the mornings before school on days when I had gym class, where my mother would cover up the reddish-purple bruises that covered the expanse between my lower bottom and thigh with thick layers of makeup. She would remind me of how I could never let anyone see what she had done to me; of how, if I did, they'd send me away to somewhere "ten times worse than this". "If you think it's bad here, you won't know what hit you when you get there" she'd menacingly warn me.

Ever since I'd been born, my mother had completely cut herself off from the rest of the community - not that it seemed she'd ever been that close with them to begin with. She treated them with suspicion and they did so back to her. This isolation, while completely self-imposed, only sought to deepen her resentment towards me; as I got older, she became ever more distant from me; spending her days alone in the living room day-drinking and buried in clouds of cigarette smoke. We were effectively two strangers stuck in the same house.

During the desperation of my teenage years, I had kept hope alive by hatching an escape plan that I was going to enact as soon as my 18th birthday came around - a milestone my mother was sure to forget. When the all important birthday finally came around, I had gone over the plan so many times in my head that I remembered every detail of it as if it had been etched into my brain; shortly after midnight, by which point my mother would have certainly crashed out in a drunken haze in front of the tv, I would leave. I would unlock my bedroom door from the inside using a wire coat hanger (A trick I learnt when I was 13) and would leave quietly via the backdoor before hopping over the fence and catching the number 12 bus that stopped two streets away at quarter to and quarter past every hour.

Sure enough the bus arrived on schedule and I paid for my ticket using loose change I'd collected over the years; most of which I had found in my mother's pockets while doing laundry. As I sat on the bus - two rows from the front - waiting for the lights to turn green and for my journey out of this town to begin, I thought about how long I'd been imagining this moment and how now, it was actually coming true. 'Red to amber to green and I'm off' I'd say to myself as I fantasized about this moment; imagining an older version of myself, stepping into adulthood and towards the rest of my life, brimming with hope as each turn took me further and further away from the prison I had called home for 18 years.

Yet, as I sat here - two rows behind the expressionless driver and many rows in front of the sleeping drunk whose odour had quickly travelled down to the front of the bus - it was hard to feel anything but crippling anxiety. My entire childhood and adolescence had been Hell, but it was a familiar and predictable Hell; I was reasonably sure of what each day would entail and had found copious coping mechanisms to make the days ever-so-slightly easier. I'd learnt to leave my mother alone, I'd learned not to use the bathroom between 8 and 9pm because that was when she liked to take her baths and, I learnt to apologize and not argue my case if I ever did anything that annoyed her. I looked at the green light and realized that while it did indeed promise hope, it brought along so many other things too; uncertainty, isolation, rootlessness. I had barely a penny to my name and no idea how I'd put a roof over my head and food in my stomach for more than the next week or two. My plan, that had once felt so fully realised now felt wholly inadequate. Was I way out of my depths? I wondered, and then, I began to think the unthinkable, 'what if I have to end up crawling back to my mother?', 'can you imagine her punishment?' I wondered, 'she'd unleash a brutality unlike anything I'd ever seen from her before'. 'No', I thought, 'there's no going back now'.

I took the bus as far as it went and proceeded to hop on half-a-dozen buses until I was satisfied that where I'd ended up was sufficiently far away. I found a diner a few minutes walk away and went in and ordered a stack of pancakes. Finally settled, the adrenaline that had kept me awake for over 24 hours and the anxiety that had suppressed my appetite were waning and I was becoming ravenously hungry and exhausted. As I sat in the diner, I began to think about my mother; how she would've woken up by now and discovered I was gone. I wondered what her reaction would have been to finding out the news; furious rage? Indignation? Relief that I was gone? Or would she just not care? I smiled thinking about how I'd never know her reaction to the discovery because I'd never see her again.

I asked the waitress at the diner where the nearest motel or B&B was and she pointed me in the direction of a B&B a mile down the long stretch of rural road ahead. I arrived there about 20 minutes after I set off; the walk made increasingly harder by a mixture of exhaustion and bloating. The B&B was quaint and low-budget; very much a no frills affair. Yet, it was well kept, seemed clean and properly maintained and, offered me the only thing I wanted at that moment; a room off my own where I could rest my head and where I knew I wouldn't wake up to find the door locked from the outside.

The B&B had a help wanted sign advertised in the front window and when I enquired about it they revealed they were looking for a new cleaner. After taking a lengthy nap, I wrote out a CV on the notepad provided in my room. I wondered whether my handwritten CV would be endearing and if they'd take sympathy on someone so thoroughly down on their luck or, if they'd see it and dismiss it out of hand.

I poured my heart out on the CV - more than I'm proud to admit - I wrote about my abusive mother; how she locked me in my room, hit me and forgot to feed me, I wrote about my plan and it's execution and, how little money I had; how I had no idea how I'd survive until the end of the month if I didn't get this job. I had no idea if I'd get the job; I had no idea whether they'd take sympathy on me or simply see me as desperate and look elsewhere.

Luckily for me, they did have sympathy for me and gave me the job; additionally, they agreed for me to pay decreased rent in exchange for doing the job; meaning I'd have enough money to pay rent, buy food and still have a little extra cash on the side.

I was overjoyed, most people would have been horrified to think of themselves practically begging for a low-paid job like this, but I couldn't have been happier. Most people dreamed of fame and wealth and opulence, but all I'd wanted was to move away and be able to provide for myself and, now I could.

The cleaning job turned out, unsurprisingly, to be crucial to my survival. I wouldn't stay in the job for too long; after a year, I was offered a job at the front-desk and after another year I was offered the role of manager. Two years later, I finally had enough money to move out into the city center and do what I had always dreamed off; go to college and get a degree. I still think about the green light; all the hope it symbolised, everything it promised and, everything that my following of the green light brought along with it. I never could have imagined what would come from following my plan and escaping, but I'm glad everyday that I did.