Sleep sometimes evades me. Days, weeks, months at a time. I’ll get a few hours here or there, then move through my life on autopilot, my body upright while my brain feels like it’s on fire.

One night, I found myself awake at 2:13 a.m., so I put on my hiking shoes and started walking.

That’s how most of my leaving begins. Not some grand decision, just a quiet refusal to stay still inside my own head. The air was colder than I expected when I finally made it to the trail, the kind of cold that feels honest. No performance. No pretending to be okay.

Just breath. Dirt. Darkness.

I’m afraid of the dark. Petrified. It scares me in a way that daylight never could because in the dark, every sound feels like a memory trying to find me again. But 2025 was the year of fate and I wanted to prove how healed I was.

Hiking at night turns everything into instinct. Heart beating out of my chest instinct. The beam of my headlamp caught pieces of the world in fragments – a slick root, the strange curve of a rock, the way fog hangs low like something alive. Beyond the light was nothing I could control.

Night just lets you move.

I found hiking cleared my head. That night, it felt more like I was outrunning a version of myself that kept trying to pull me backward. Old thoughts had been loud. You know the kind – memories that arrive uninvited, voices that don’t belong to me anymore but still know how to echo.

So, I climbed.

My legs were burning halfway up the ridge. My lungs caught on the thin air, and for a moment I found myself wondering if this was just another way of running. Trading one exhaustion for another. But there’s something honest about uphill miles. You can’t fake them. You can’t charm your way through the elevation gain. The mountain doesn’t care who you were yesterday.

That’s why I went.

Out there, I’m not the person people remember. I’m not the version of me frozen in old stories. I’m not the evidence laid out in front a jury of his peers. I’m just a body moving forward, heartbeat loud enough to drown out everything else.

I checked my watch, 2:47 a.m., I stopped near a clearing where the trees thinned and the sky opened wide. Stars spilled across the sky. Endless. Indifferent.

This is the part no one sees – the hours between leaving and arriving. The space where running feels less like escape and more like confession. Every step says something I don’t know how to write yet.

Looking up at the sky, I thought about all the times I packed up my life and called it freedom. Maybe sometimes it was.

I think about the day I escaped abuse. How vastly different that looked than every other time. Felt less like a choice and more like oxygen returning to my lungs.

All I knew for sure was that every mile put me further from the versions of me that had to endure too much for too long.

There’s a strange truth that comes from walking in the dark, you either keep going or you turn back. That night, turning back felt heavier than climbing.

An owl called out somewhere, it’s voice low and certain. I realized that my mind had become quiet. Not empty, just less crowded. Like the loud was finally loosening its grip.

Around 3:30 a.m. I stumbled on a small overlook I didn’t know was there. I could see the valley stretching out in shadows. My town sleeping quietly below. No one knows I’m here.

No one is waiting for me to explain myself.

So, for the first time – I stopped. Really stopped.

Sat on a boulder. And nothing bad happened.

That part still surprises me most when I think about this moment – the stillness. The way my body didn’t immediately brace for impact. The way the dark and silence felt like permission instead of anger.

Running brought me here but staying in that moment – that’s what changed me.

I sipped my water and watched the horizon begin to soften. That almost-dawn grey crept in and promised light without rushing it. My muscles ached, my hands were numb and I felt more present that I had my entire life.

Standing on that ridge, watching the night slowly loosen its grip on the sky, I realized something even softer. I was not being chased.

I managed to move through the dark without abandoning myself.

Maybe that’s what I needed to learn all along, that running isn’t always about leaving something behind.

Sometimes it’s how you find the version of yourself that finally knows where to stand.

Even at 2:00 a.m.
Even alone.
Even above the tree line where the world stops asking questions and simply lets you exist.