To Flee or not to Flee: The Paradox of Growth Through Escapism
substantiated through an anecdotal personal essay detailing when my cousin Riel and I spontaneously fled to North Dakota
The notion of escapism acting as a safety net for intense emotions is neither unheard of or uncommon. In fact, a handful of people find themselves fleeing their problems rather than facing them head on, hence the consistent push-and-pull in the “fight or flight” ideology. This perception will be explored and developed through considering my cousin Riel and I’s spontaneous trip to North Dakota in an attempt to gain a sense of control and thus, stability in a time of immense change.
In balmy July on a patriotic Canada Day weekend, my cousin Riel and I were notably at our lowest. I had recently been broken up with by my high-school boyfriend and had fled to the familiarity of Winnipeg with my Dad, attempting to distance myself from the newly melancholic nature of my hometown. Congruently, Riel had broken up with her long-term boyfriend and was drastically changing her career path for law school. For most, law school is a lifeless process, often engulfing one in the hostility of it all. Not only was she conforming to a path that pleased everyone except herself, but she was also complying to move away from “safe” Winnipeg, a city turned home by the presence of her family, to disconventional North Dakota. I had been in Winnipeg for a couple days before the trip, surrounded mainly by Riel as we navigated through obligatory family gatherings together despite our evident despair. We left family barbecues early to drive around in the twilight of the night searching for answers, or sympathy, or perhaps just togetherness, but instead, finding ourselves right back where we started.
The days leading up to the trip were spent fantasizing about the possibilities that North Dakota held (or that we thought held), delving ourselves into multiple to-do lists of activities we wanted to do, while laying in bed watching monotonous episodes of Escape to the Country, in which the couple wishing to “escape” never ended up buying the house. This concept of viewing three beautiful countryside homes in England, but each episode ending with the couple never buying a house seemed oddly fitting. Perhaps after watching so many episodes, Riel and I had somehow morphed into the show as we viewed endless possibilities of all bright, hopeful outcomes, yet choosing none of them and thus, settling. We toyed with idealized notions of potential futures, but refused to fully commit, thereby continuously conforming ourselves to people and places that we had long outgrown.
On the morning of July 3rd, we had packed up Riel’s fitful 2006 Volvo S60, questioning its capability to bring us safely to our destination, but trusting it nevertheless. It seemed as though we basked in the recklessness of it all, as if recklessness was somehow better than cautiousness. We had a two and a half hour drive ahead of us with the option of two CDs: a disk consisting of a compilation of classical music pieces, or Drake’s 2015 mixtape “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late” — our moodiness chose the latter. The title of Drake’s soundtrack described our mindset in that there was no backing out from our decision; the bags had been packed and we were set on taking off. The drive was painfully straight with little sights to see besides a handful of obnoxiously positive billboards on the side of the road, the most notable of the few merely reading “smile.” The sign’s elation felt as sickening as the morning after Halloween, with its placement ever-so-clever as though it was present solely to taunt Riel and I. The performative patriotism and optimism in the Canada Day weekend air pushed us further and further out of Canada as we were in no mood for celebrations. Our strange amount of energy was greatly due to an abundance of coffee, in which it was during this trip and that break up, that I had started drinking coffee. My order consisted of black coffee with ten ridiculous pumps of sugar syrup, acting as a sweetener not only for my coffee, but for my mood. We drank not an ounce of water that entire trip, besides the melted ice cubes in our endless cups of coffee. We were in no mood for moderation.
Our first stop in North Dakota was at a Target which resided dangerously close to Riel’s new apartment. We stocked up on all of the necessities for a new place, choosing pastel pink dinnerware sets, with baby blue and blush coloured linens. The delicate colours of the items we had chosen juxtaposed with our sour attitudes exemplified the nature of our trip entirely. It all seemed so pleasantly performative as we meandered through the Target aisles, throwing anything and everything into the cart in the name of retail therapy. We found ourselves oddly drawn to the multivitamin aisle which hosted an array of OLLY vitamins each for different solutions: beauty, stress, focus, sleep, and energy. Perhaps our bizarre interest in these multivitamins represented our search for an easy cure for this dejection. The vitamins reached out to us like an overly enthusiastic actor on an as-seen-on-TV advertisement holding a handful of colourful gummies in silly shapes, emphasizing with a large toothy clown smile, “Here, take a scrumptious fruit-flavoured gummy like you would as a kid and watch all of your problems magically disappear!” We rejected the $20.00 vitamins and quickly vacated the aisle before we could change our minds, instead perusing various scented soaps, tacky toys, or pretty pillows.
Riel and I were in a weird state of mind altogether. We were not moody with each other, nor with North Dakota, but moody collectively in our individual pursuits. We were constantly up-and-down, our moods as unpredictable and spontaneous as the trip itself. The most demonstrative of this perception lies in the night of July 4th, typically a night of festivities in the United States, but one of eccentricity for my dear cousin and I.
After a night of sleeping only on blankets on Riel’s hardwood floor in her new apartment, we moved quite slowly that morning, despite the unusual level of comfort that the floor had provided us with. A comfort that we continuously sought in people but ironically found, instead, on hard ground. Strange. That night, we had decided to go to the only movie theatre in small-town Grand Forks and go see the 2019 horror “Midsommar.” The exterior wood on the theatre looked incredibly rusted, but not in the aesthetic contemporary way, instead, as though it could crumble down on us at any moment. The interior of the theatre was constructed of wood logs and a black carpet with splotches of red, orange, and yellow blobs to which their true shapes were impossible to decipher. The carpet looked like vomit. It made us want to vomit. The front concession stand was unsettlingly vacant so we opted out of getting snacks. As we tread across the oddly stained carpet, we found our room behind a rickety wooden door. Instead of playing trailers for upcoming movies, this decrepit theatre showed religious advertisements before the show. How ironic these commercials were before watching a horror movie about a religious cult. It seemed almost planned, as if these commercials were there to daunt us - but that seemed too clever for good-ol’ Grand Forks. There was one other couple and it stayed that way throughout the whole film, except they left before the end of the movie. The movie itself was disturbingly graphic and eerie — likely the worst possible movie we could have watched in that creepy theatre, which was straight out of a horror film in itself. Perhaps it was the documented failing relationship shown in “Midsommar” to which Riel and I related a little too perfectly, or, perhaps, it was the increasingly off-putting nature of the movie as a whole as it showcased a character’s gradual descent, ostensibly encapsulating the last few weeks for the two of us. Whichever it was, we left the theatre in a weird and offbeat mood to which I honestly have not felt again since that night. We were either extremely hyper and giggly or extremely solemn and silent that entire night. In any true escapist nature, we jumped in the Volvo and went straight from the theatre to Target, which acted as a comfortable safe-haven for Riel and I throughout the entirety of our trip.
During this Target run, we picked up a single bouncy ball who we named, fittingly enough, “Ball”, and went back to Riel’s apartment. We sat on the hardwood floor in the bare living room –which had no windows, and consequently, no outside light– for an hour or so, sitting at opposite ends of the vacant apartment while rolling Ball back and forth between each other. This kept our strange mood at bay for a fair bit until it didn’t…
Thus, in true escapist nature, and as any two crazy cousins would, we embarked back to Target. It was still as empty as it was when we went in hours before, ostensibly due to the fact that no one wanted to spend 11pm on the Fourth of July at a Target — that is, except for us. On this particular run, we picked up a boxed set of twenty-five pastel cards and envelopes with the idea of addressing them to all of our friends and sending them out, along with a singular pack of blueberries and four boxes of Poptarts. The blueberries were used for a photoshoot against Riel’s bare apartment wall where I dreamed that the effortlessly-cute picture of me eating my dainty little blueberries was bound to intrigue my apathetic ex-boyfriend and catty friends back home. “You know you don’t have to actually eat the blueberries, you can just hold them and pretend…” Riel had said to me after well over half of the package had already been devoured in the name of photography. “Oh…” I replied, continuing to finish the pack of blueberries regardless. Despite my attempt at staging the perfect photoshoot, none of the photos turned out — because of course they didn’t.
As for the Poptarts, they were sickeningly sweet, as one would expect, but we devoured all of them nonetheless. The sweetness of the Poptarts coupled with an entire package of blueberries in my stomach battled against my sour mood, yet yielded to my melancholia. We excitedly unpacked the pastel cards on Riel’s kitchen island, and in exact coordination, hovered the pen over the paper for a couple of seconds before dropping it, and sitting back in our chairs as we simultaneously realized that we had no one to write them to besides each other. In that moment, we realized how much we needed each other, subsequently packing the cards back up into their tiny clear boxes and hurriedly setting them far aside — completely out of our view. I do not think we picked them up again for the remainder of our trip. That night, we laid on the hardwood floor next to each other and talked for hours before sleeping off the peculiar mood that lingered in the evening air after the events that were “Midsommar.”
We drove back to Winnipeg the next morning, with the same kind of coffee and the same Drake CD as we had merely days before, but yet something was different. There was an unexplainable sense of understanding in the air drafting through the Volvo’s ventilation system as Riel and I appeared lighter. It is not to say that our problems merely vanished, they most definitely had not, but we felt more comfortable to handle them through the companionship within our mutual misery. And I continue to be comfortable in my only remaining souvenir from that trip: a $5.00 black shirt from Target which reigns superlative above all other shirts I’ve owned to this day.
thank you for reading my literary library. your support never goes unrecognized or unappreciated. as always, if you have anything to add to the conversation: comments, questions, praise, contrarian perspectives… don’t hesitate!
from my heart to yours, kara koblanski. <3