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  • Dispatches from Anywhere but Here
  • Angela Palm (bio)

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My need to flee began long before I called it that. It started as a series of adventures, and then it became more pressing, more intentional. Sometimes I thought my aimlessness might have been friction resulting from Corey’s absence. The boy next door whose bedroom window had faced mine for years as we grew from children into adolescents into hormonal teenagers, the boy who I imagined would someday be mine, had instead been sentenced to life in prison for murder my junior year of high school. I was still troubled by losing him, though I never spoke of it to anyone. The fact that I still thought [End Page 68] of him in this way worried me. Why couldn’t I incriminate him like everyone else and bury it? In addition to English literature, I had decided to study criminal justice in college, and that choice was in large part motivated by the idea that if I could somehow intellectually understand how he had ended up imprisoned for life at nineteen—understand the reasons people commit violent crimes—then with enough education, I could also save him from the fate he’d earned. I could beat the system for him. Or at least make it better for others, on both sides of crime.

I’d selected a college based on proximity to Greg, my hometown boyfriend. Greg worked as an excavator, rearranging the terrain. I liked his job as a metaphor. On the weekends, we would obsessively scour the newspaper for vacant land that we could buy for a future home, but as soon as I started school, I realized we were worlds apart. I was interested in books, in sociology and criminology. He was interested in fishing and heavy machinery and wrestling.

Living one town over from home was barely leaving. Tumbleweeds on the plains traveled farther than I did. I’d wanted so badly to leave, but when the time came, I recreated what I’d already known because I couldn’t think of anything different. Greg was a safety net. If I had a boyfriend I was committed to, around whom I could plan my life, I wouldn’t have to figure out my actual life. I hadn’t seen or experienced much else, hadn’t known many educated women, so everything that wasn’t home was foreign and thus frightening. The first sweatshirt I bought from the college bookstore had the school’s year of establishment printed on it: 1889. It had been operating for over one hundred years. The first in my family to go from high school to a four-year college, I was shocked to learn that people my grandmother’s age had gone to college. I’d considered higher education a “new” thing because it seemed as though my family was just now learning of it.

I still went home on weekends to do my laundry. If I was hungry, I ordered the same kind of fast food I had eaten at home. I stored frozen quarts of my dad’s homemade chili, filled with vegetables from his garden, in my tiny dorm room freezer. If someone had said, “Here is a blank piece of paper, draw a living room—anything you want,” I would have sketched my mother’s sofa and pine furniture. My dad visited me at school once a month when he was passing through for work. He would take me to lunch and we made small talk for thirty minutes, and he offered life wisdom: “Don’t sweat the small things,” he reminded me. Before we parted ways, he’d hand me a fifty or a hundred-dollar bill and I would want to not take it, but then I would pocket it reluctantly and kiss his cheek in thanks.

Soon, though, even that was too much. I needed more independence. I broke up with Greg and got a campus job tutoring basketball and football players to earn spending money. I imagined myself a satellite gathering information about the unknown world, extending sensors in...

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