Briefly

Stories about young people running away from home often don’t end well, but I just heard a story of a good outcome. The young woman who shared her story with me isn’t a child, though. She’s in her early 20s, but she ran away from home last year. She lived in Michigan with her dysfunctional family. Her mom was addicted to meth and various prescription drugs. She was the only one in the family who worked — and her family took almost all of the money she earned. The only bright spot in her life was a guy she met online playing a video game. The two grew close and fell in love. About 18 months ago, she secretly packed everything she owned — and he drove from Birmingham to Michigan to pick her up without her family’s knowledge. Today, they’re married and have a new baby. She says leaving her family was the second best thing that ever happened to her — and her husband and baby are the best. “He doesn’t seem to understand what a big deal it was,” she said, “but he saved my life. I took a big risk and he did, too, but I’m happy and loved for the first time in my life.” It might not be common, but some runaway stories do end well.

This is apparently what I would look like as a woman, at least according to a ridiculous app called FaceApp that I’ve been playing with late Thursday night. (Find links for iOS and Android here.) It’s been around for a couple of years, but I just downloaded the free version and had some fun. I’m happy to say that the app has diplomatically given me a bit of liposuction in the process, so this is probably more like what I might look like as a woman who’s about 70 pounds lighter. My sisters were both beautiful young women — and one of them annoyed her classmates by winning a beauty contest and then never caring enough about it to mention it again — so maybe our genes are better for females than males. Give it a try. It’s silly, but it’s fun.

Missing someone always seems worst in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe it’s because our days are filled with things that distract us with tasks to accomplish and then we find ourselves alone at night with our thoughts and feelings. I’ve been having trouble sleeping for many months, but I rarely try to explain why, even though I know very clearly. As an evening drags on and it becomes more silent, I seem to be left with the best and the worst of my hopes and fears. And that makes it hard to turn my brain off and go to sleep. In one of her private letters, writer Edna St. Vincent Millay voiced what I feel: “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” But would you erase love for someone from your mind to be rid of that torture? In the movie, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” that’s the central premise, although it takes a long time to understand what’s going on. Two people start out wanting to forget one another, but it turns out that forgetting is even more painful. There’s nothing better than experiencing real love. Living with lost love is terribly painful, but not as painful as losing the part of yourself that still knows how to love unconditionally.