SHOUT - Adopted by Lin Manuel Miranda

EXILE

I leave through the fire escape so the doorman won't ask questions. Inching my way down the steps takes a long time. I'm hurt more than I realized. My legs are sore from standing all day and my shoulder is numb from the weight of my duffel bag. 

When I reach the bottom, I fling the bag to the ground and slide down the pole attached to the side of the building so I don't land too hard. I cut through the alley and run. My head spins. My sneakers pound against the concrete, my vision blurry with wetness, darkness rising inside me. I knock into shoulders as I run. A woman with a walker cries out as I fling past her. I think of Radhika as people shove at me, Radhika who was left behind, My Mother who was trapped. The darkness washes over me, car horns and sirens and engines swelling in my ears. At the corner by the Tobillo field I see Radhika bent at the waist, a hand holding back her hair, beating at her back with something long and leather and mean, and I stop short, stumbling backwards. I try to turn away, but there she is again— a different girl, younger, bent the same way, crying in the same broken-flute voice. We were the same. Radhika, whispering into my ear late at night, explaining exactly how a certain pirate kidnapped her and what the treasure chest looked like when she found it. Nayim and I flying through the park, kite high in the sky above us. My Mother braids my hair and tells me to stop moving my head. My Mother washes me where it bleeds and hurts and bleeds and hurts. Trapped behind the locked door with My Father and the fist in my mouth, I scream I scream I scream until my throat is raw. Coming back to New York while Radhika stayed behind, loneliness eating me alive from the inside out. I could have done more. I should have done more. I liked to fuck around, I liked to swear and pick fights at the playground, but I liked to go home, too, to my shoddy bed and mehndi and basketball, and a mother who liked to brush my hair and sing songs when she thought nobody was listening. I turn a corner. I don't know where I am. My Mother's back to me as the Nice Lady With The Clipboard took me away, nowhere to go. Jeremy after I came to Hope House, Jeremy and counselors and girls with fangs. Ruth with the pencil tip in her hand. The nurse with her clipboard as I held my stomach and said, something hurts. Yes, something does hurt. Radhika and Nayim and Lin and Vanessa and Sebastian and Gracie and My Mother, up and away to Pakistan, the ghost of My Father pushing her away from me. Do I hate Him for what he did? Or do I hate myself for keeping Him inside me? Dark. I am all dark. I try to find a way out of all this dark but every corner I turn it gets harder to see through it. There are too many people in my head. I want to claw them out, but they're buried too deep in the parts of me I never want to touch.

I run until my vision goes black at the edges, darkness ripping through the loneliness and swallowing me whole.