Lessons on Walking

I try so hard to ignore the existence of other people when I go anywhere with my daughter now, but it never really works, even then I can feel eyes on me. It’s like having bugs crawling all over you. You just want to shake them all off and start running. I really did start running yesterday when she wobbled into an elevator without me. I’m sure there were at least ten people gaping at me then but all I could see were her little hands reaching for the buttons. Even though humans are far more conscious then they could ever ask to be, thankfully, no one can really focus on more than one thing at a time. It’s impossible to concern yourself with the judgment of others when your little everything is about to disappear behind a heavy metal door. I took her around the waist and just scooped her right out of that elevator. It wasn’t until I set her back down again that I felt those eyes digging into my conscious with shovels and wails of shock in the form of whispers. I wanted to start running again.
It’s the most perplexing feeling, becoming a parent at seventeen. Every emotion just makes you want to jump out of your body and run in two different directions at the same time. But when you’re done with the running, when you can’t stand the panic any longer, you have to just sit there and face this thing, and you don’t really even know what it is. But I could tell you exactly what I was doing the moment I found out, exactly what I was wearing, what kind of soda I was drinking, the words that came out of his mouth when I told him a week later. “You can’t.”… I can’t. What am I supposed to do with that? I guess I was expecting his words to some how cure the fears I was having. I told him to leave and I watched him drive away in that old piece of junk he had gotten for his birthday. That car was his baby. He didn’t have room for another one; I could have told him that. My whole life I’ve felt like I was older than everyone else at school, I didn’t think that would ever actually have to be tested.
After that, when I came home from school every day I would go to my room, close the door and stare at the wall for a good half hour before I could function, talk to people rationally or figure the answers to math equations. Something caused a delay in my thought process every day. My head was filled with flashes of giving birth, glances from unapproving classmates, the first steps of this imaginary baby, but there were no more emotions for a good month. Some things are just too big for that. At some point you have to stop running and pick up a steady pace, one that you can sustain for longer than a week. It’s not like I sat there disgusted, wanting it out of me and I wasn’t dreaming about how cute this baby would be either. It just happened and I’ve just lived and even though I still want to run sometimes, I know she can’t yet, and I have to accept that.