I Wanted To Run So Far Away

The news came in sideways, the way the worst things always do.

Not through a broadcast or a breaking chyron bleeding red across a television screen—though those were there, eventually, the bar's mounted flatscreen cycling through footage of smoke columns rising above Tehran like the world was auditioning for its own apocalypse. No. The news came in the way it does when you're already tired, already poured into the cracked leather stool at the end of Miguel's bar like something left out too long in the heat. It came in through Leila's phone, then Eileen's mouth, then Leila again louder, and then it was everywhere—a contagion of horror spreading mouth to ear around the basement until the whole room smelled like burning.

It was late February, and the world had apparently decided that wasn't quite wretched enough on its own.

I had been at my desk until 4 PM wrestling with a firewall anomaly that kept insisting it wasn't there, which is the DevOps equivalent of a ghost that also submits help tickets. By the time I got down those narrow back stairs and pushed through the alley door marked Family Only—the faded rainbow sticker peeling at one corner, brave little bastard—the bar had already been processing the news for an hour. I could feel it before I registered it. The room had a particular frequency when people were horrified versus when they were merely angry, and tonight the frequency was a low, bone-deep hum that lived somewhere behind the sternum.

The sound system was doing its best. Kansas was asking if anybody else had been carried to the wind, and I thought: yes. Constantly. The opening bars of "Carry On Wayward Son" moved through the brick walls like something trying to get out, and I settled onto my stool and let it wash over me while Miguel registered my arrival with the particular calibration of someone who has been watching for you.

Hey, Mom, he said, already reaching. Rough one.

Tell me something I don't know, I said, and watched his hands.

What he poured was a Knob Creek Single Barrel—twelve years in charred American oak, which Miguel knew because he'd explained it to me twice while I pretended not to care about whiskey provenance, which was a lie, because I cared about everything in this basement with a ferocity that sometimes frightened me. The pour was two fingers, generous. The color was deep amber, the particular shade of late afternoon light through old glass, and the first hit of it landed warm and direct, with that clean rye bite underneath the sweetness that makes your jaw relax before your brain gets the memo. I let it sit on my tongue for a moment. Something with actual years behind it. Something that had waited.

I needed that. Everything else felt like it had arrived too fast.

Eileen had already been at the high-top near the door since early evening. She was still in the crisp navy jacket she'd worn on whatever flight brought her back to ground, posture ramrod-perfect, but her hands were doing something frantic with her phone—scrolling, refreshing, scrolling again—the digital equivalent of pacing. She'd pulled her hair back tight, which meant she was in crisis mode.

Aircraft carriers, she was saying to no one in particular, and to everyone. Two of them. No declaration of war. No congressional authorization. A video on Truth Social. He posted a goddamn video on Truth Social.

He's been running foreign policy like a Twitch stream for four years, Leila said, not looking up from her own phone across the room. She was tucked into the corner booth, legs folded under her, the particular stillness of someone reading very fast and very carefully. Why would this be different.

Because this one killed children, Leila.

The room went quieter than it had been. Not silent—the music, Genesis easing into "The Carpet Crawlers," that cathedral opening building toward something that would break your heart if you let it—but the human sound dropped.

Five girls, Leila said, and her voice was flat in the way that voices go flat when the horror is too large to inflect. Primary school. Saturday is their first school day of the week. They bombed a girls' school in broad daylight.

Dani had both hands around a mug of tea she'd brought herself because Sanctuary's kitchen didn't carry the particular chamomile blend she trusted. Her crystals were arranged on the table in front of her in a pattern she'd built slowly over the last hour—selenite at the north, black tourmaline at corners, rose quartz in the center. She was whispering something under her breath, not a prayer exactly, but something in that neighborhood. Her scarves were deep burgundy tonight, layer over layer, and her eyes were wet.

We're in another war, she said to the crystal arrangement. Or we've been in it. We just didn't have the footage yet.

Iran retaliated, Eileen said. Missiles at Israel. At the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Al Udeid in Qatar. She set her phone down, finally. Picked up her drink—whatever it was, it looked like she wasn't tasting it. And the Ayatollah is apparently dead, if Israeli media has it right, which—

Which is always a qualifier, Leila said.

Yes. A breath. Always a qualifier.

Over in the far corner, Grubby had gone very still. They'd been working on something in a notebook when I came in—careful, cramped handwriting filling margins—but the pen was down now. They were watching the television screen with the expression of someone doing complicated mathematics about their own survival. Grubby processed the world's violence personally, in the way that people who've had their own body weaponized against them tend to do. Every atrocity lands differently when you've already learned that institutions treat certain bodies as acceptable loss.

Sage, beside them, had a napkin spread across the table—a new one, fresh—and was drawing in silence. Even from across the room I could see the shape emerging: concentric circles, radiating outward. I didn't know if it was a mandala or a target or both. Maybe that was the point.

Della emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray of something that smelled like blackened catfish and justice, and set it on the bar without ceremony.

Eat something, she said, to the room generally and to me specifically. She was wearing her "If I Have To Come Out There" apron, which she'd bought herself as a joke and wore with absolute sincerity. Food doesn't fix fascism but it fixes some of the shit fascism does to your body, and your body is what you're going to need.

Philosophy, Miguel said, with the ghost of a smile.

Shut your ass up and slice the lemon, she said, touching his arm with the casual intimacy of fifteen years together. He sliced the lemon.

I ate the catfish. She was right. She was almost always right, which she knew, which was why she didn't belabor it.

Onyx had come in sometime in the last half hour—I hadn't seen them arrive—and was settled at a small table near the stage with a mug of loose-leaf something that steamed in thin curls. They'd brought their own tin, which they always did, and a worn composition notebook covered in stickers. They were writing. Not the careful, slow writing of someone composing—the fast, urgent writing of someone trying to catch something before it got away. Their locs were pinned up, a few escaping around their face, and their cheeks were wet. Just crying while writing, the way Onyx sometimes did, grief and creation being the same motion for them, indistinguishable.

They looked up and found my eyes across the room.

I keep thinking about the mothers, they said, voice low and steady under the music. The Iranian mothers. Who sent their daughters to school this morning. Because it was Saturday. Because it was just Saturday.

There was nothing to say to that. I nodded. It was enough, or it was what I had.

The Sarah situation started, as it usually did, with Phoenix.

Phoenix was at the bar two stools down from me, electric purple streaks in their hair catching the low light in ways that looked intentional and also cosmic, wearing a flannel over a band tee with the sleeves cut off—The Cult, which I noted because the sound system was cycling and had just rolled over "Fire Woman," those opening guitar licks fat and humid and exactly right for a late February night in a basement where we were all processing the end of something. Phoenix had the focused expression of someone on a mission, which usually meant they were about to do something either beautiful or chaotic or both.

Ezra materialized beside them with the suddenness that was their particular gift, blue hair electric under the lighting, rings catching everything. They'd pulled a stool close to Phoenix with the coordinated energy of two people who'd clearly pre-planned this ambush.

Sarah, Phoenix said, across the bar, to where Sarah the Stoic was nursing something amber over ice and reading from a battered paperback she carried everywhere like it was ballast.

Sarah looked up. Military-pressed flannel. Boots announcing themselves against the floor rung of her stool. Expression of someone who has already calculated seventeen possible conversation trajectories and prepared for all of them.

No, she said.

We haven't asked anything yet, Ezra said, with the enthusiasm of someone who absolutely has not accepted this answer.

You were going to ask about the person I'm seeing. She turned a page. No.

We just want to know— Phoenix started.

The answer is still no. But Sarah was almost smiling. Almost. The corner of her mouth was doing something complicated, suppressing something that wasn't irritation. You two planned this, didn't you.

We texted, Ezra admitted.

Of course you did. She finally closed the book, keeping her finger in her place—which I noted, because Sarah never fully surrendered her exits. What exactly do you think I'm going to tell you.

A name, Phoenix said.

A pronoun at least, Ezra said.

No. She said it warmly this time, which was interesting. Sarah's no's had different temperatures, and I'd been paying attention. This one was warm. But I'll tell you something else, if you can behave like adults for five minutes.

They could not behave like adults for five minutes. They were, between them, the equivalent of approximately one adult, and that adult was generous. But they settled, Phoenix propping elbows on the bar, Ezra swiveling their stool slightly.

Sarah put the book down entirely. Picked up her drink. Looked at it the way people look at things when they're deciding how much truth to pour.

I was in a relationship for a long time, you know before I came out as a lesbian woman, she said, that I genuinely believed was working. Because I didn't know what working felt like. I had nothing to compare it to. You understand what I mean by that?

Sure, Phoenix said, and I could hear that they did. They did understand. Their whole life was learning the shapes of things they'd never been given language for.

I couldn't sing in front of him, Sarah said. Isn't that a strange thing to notice about yourself? She wasn't asking them. She was turning it over in her own hands. I'd be in the car with my child and we'd belt out everything—AJR, Barenaked Ladies, Dave Matthews, CCR, Queen—windows down, voices embarrassing—and then if he was in the car I'd go completely quiet. Like a bird that stops singing when the cat comes in the room.

Because he made you feel— Ezra started.

Because he didn't make me feel safe. She said it cleanly, without drama. Not unsafe, necessarily. He wasn't cruel. He was just... absent in the particular way that costs you something you don't notice until years later. He'd scoff at things I wanted to do. Projects. Hobbies. And then I'd do them anyway, alone, because what else, but I stopped asking. And then I stopped wanting to be seen at all. I stopped dancing when he was in the room. I stopped singing. I moved through our life like I was trying not to disturb something. A pause. The bass in "Fire Woman" throbbed through the walls. And I got very, very good at being independent. Out of self-preservation.

Phoenix was quiet for a moment. Then: That's lonely.

It's a particular kind of lonely, Sarah agreed. Because you're not alone. You're just unseen. By someone who should be seeing you. She sipped her drink. I helped him when he struggled. I managed everything—the budget, his emotional weather, my daughter, the meals, the goddamn dishes—and when I needed help with my own projects, the things that were mine, he'd look at me like I was speaking a language that wasn't worth learning. And I got bitter. And we'd drift. And somehow—somehow—it would loop back around to being my fault.

What an astonishing fucking trick, Ezra said, with genuine outrage.

Sarah almost laughed. It really is. It's quite a trick. She turned the glass slowly on the bar. I enjoyed the drifting, though. By the end. Because it meant time to myself. Time to learn things. Time to exist without managing someone else's gravity. Her expression shifted into something quieter. I found people who shared my interests. I built friendships around the things I actually cared about. And eventually I understood the difference between being loved and being kept.

Phoenix leaned forward. And now?

Now I have someone who sees me. Simple. Plain. The most complicated thing in the world, said simply. And I don't know what to do with it yet, exactly. Because when you've spent years not being seen, actually being seen is— She stopped for a minute, almost a tear crossing her cheek. Searched for the word with the focus of someone who values precision. Terrifying. And completely necessary. And I have to keep reminding myself that it's okay to let my guard down. That that's not the same as losing myself. That the masks I wore so long I forgot they were masks—those can come off. It's just going to take time.

That's beautiful, Ezra said, not ironically at all, which was how you knew it had gotten to them.

Sentimental, Sarah said, but gently. And I'm still not telling you who it is.

I respect it, Phoenix said. I don't like it, but I respect it.

Good, Sarah said, and picked her book back up, and the conversation was over with the decisive quietness of someone who knows exactly when an exit is.

I watched all of this from my stool. The Knob Creek had settled into a low warmth by now, steady and companionable, and Miguel had refreshed it without being asked, which was one of the thousand small mercies of this place.

Keira came down the stairs, bringing the particular shift in air pressure that accompanies her, the sense of something coming into calibration. She settled on the stool beside me without ceremony, ordered her usual from Miguel with a look rather than words, and picked up her book from where she'd apparently left it earlier in the day—she did this sometimes, used the bar like an extension of our living room, which was both endearing and slightly disconcerting in the way that intimacy always is.

She read for a moment. Then:

You're doing that thing aren’t you?

I'm sitting here, I said.

I know, she said. That's what I said. She didn't look up from her book. How much of it are you keeping? They are still giving Sarah some shit aren’t they?

I didn't answer, I just nodded, which was also an answer. She turned a page.

The television cycled: Tehran, smoke, official statement, casualty count revised upward. The music had shifted to something from Fleetwood Mac—"The Chain"—that particular bass line running underneath everything like a threat or a promise, depending on your mood. Five schoolgirls. A Saturday in Tehran. A video posted to Truth Social while aircraft carriers launched. The world conducting its violence with the administrative indifference of a quarterly review.

Onyx had filled three pages in their composition book. Dani had rearranged her crystals twice. Eileen had made two phone calls outside and come back each time looking like someone who'd spoken into a storm and heard no echo. Leila had stopped scrolling and was just sitting with her phone face-down, which was a different kind of reckoning.

And Sarah the Stoic had gone back to her book with the self-possession of someone who has been carrying the weight of her own interior renovation for eight months and has learned that revelations, like furniture, can only be moved one piece at a time.

Grubby had started writing again. Sage's napkin mandala had grown outward to the edges of the paper, concentric rings reaching the margins, the center dense with tiny careful marks. A record of something. A kind of prayer.

What's happening out there is going to keep happening, Bubba said, from his chair by the window, the way he sometimes surfaced—from apparent stillness, fully formed thought already built. He'd been sitting there so long he'd become part of the room's architecture. We didn't stop it in June. They built it back. We bomb it now, they'll build it back again. What you can't buy or bomb or threaten is a people who believe they're fighting for survival.

I know, Remy said, from the stool beside him, cigarette unlit but in his hand. He'd been rolling it between his fingers for an hour. I know it, cher.

Doesn't matter what we know, Bubba said. Matters what the man with the carriers decides. And he decided in a video.

The room held that. Let it settle.

Same as it ever was, Remy said, finally. Different century, same empire. Same belief that force is the only language. Same bodies in the schoolyard paying the bill. He put the cigarette behind his ear. *Mon Dieu.

I finished my bourbon. The warmth of it had moved from chest to somewhere behind the eyes, not drunk, just held. I thought about five girls who went to school on a Saturday morning because Saturday is when the week begins in Tehran, and I thought about the chain we're all in—politicians, carriers, missiles, schoolyards, the child-bodies that pay for the decisions of men who will never stand in a schoolyard—and I thought about Sarah in her car, windows down, finally singing.

Both things were true. They were always both true. The catastrophic and the quietly revolutionary, running simultaneously, in the same hour, in the same species, in the same smoke-and-music-smelling basement where we were all just trying to breathe.

Miguel set a hand on my shoulder briefly—just weight, no words—and went back to wiping glasses.

Outside, the alley door held its faded rainbow sticker against another night.

Inside, we held each other. The way people hold things they cannot fix and will not put down.

What happened tonight in this basement was two things at once: a reckoning with empire's latest invoice, and a quiet woman describing what it felt like to finally be allowed to sing in her own car. Lorde understood that these are not separate conversations. The same architecture that sanctions missiles dropped on school children is the architecture that trains people to make themselves small, invisible, quiet, manageable—in relationships, in rooms, in the story of their own lives. The tools of dominance are not only geopolitical. They are intimate. They live in the space between two people in a car, in who gets to take up sound and who learns to muffle themselves to survive proximity. Sarah's unmasking and the girls in Tehran are connected. Not equivalently. But truly. What we build here—this basement, this choosing each other—is the antithesis of that architecture. Small. Insufficient. Absolutely necessary.