Friday, March 24, 2017

these mornings.



these mornings begin with darkness and reluctance, reluctance to get out of bed, reluctance to leave a state of dreams, reluctance to begin confronting..everything. these mornings evolve, though, because, the night before, preparations were made. and, just before bed, somebody put out his own damn running shoes and running jacket and running hat and heart rate monitor strap and all that other synthetic stuff, and somebody took away, sock by running sock, every excuse to not start confronting things. these mornings change into glimpses of running clothes pulled on over physio tape residue clinging gainly to white white skin stretched over once-young bones now holding up the wiry remains of an athlete’s form. these mornings hear creaking steps rather than creaking joints and then, with a pull, the door closes. these mornings evolve into steps first peaceful and then steps not hurried, but steady now, through the darkness, through the quiet, through the rumbling, waking city. these mornings dogs amble and lights drone and just before dawn and just after the turnaround point, wane into steady rain. these mornings begin to drip and droop under the clean, quiet blackness making the whole world shiny before seeping through seams onto steaming shoulders where her fingers used to linger. these mornings the gutters course with the detritus of a winter of longing, and steps splash insolent on the return dash home. these mornings the quiet yawns into bleak grey that looks like his eyes but is too cold for his heart. these mornings, his heart burns.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

happen.




if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it occurred.

if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it did not happen.

it did not happen because in order for something to happen, someone or something must be the object of the verb happen; something must be happened to or upon, and if no one was there, no one was happened to, and thus, nothing happened.

this is, of course, the meaning of life.

no, i do not mean to say that the meaning of life is a simplistic sum of semantics. i say that the meaning of life has everything to do with context, with community, with consequence, with understanding that we, in all our bodies and hopes and hurts, are suspended in a pool of community and time. we do not know that we are moving unless we turn. we do not know that we exist unless we touch. we do not know that we hurt unless we heal.


Thursday, March 2, 2017

broken.



i broke my streak yesterday.

it was the first day of a new month that, in other countries, marks the beginning of spring and promise and planting for harvest and, in a word, hope. instead, i let the red marker lie in its magenta leather change box next to a box of strike anywhere matches and a pocket knife. and i did not put an 'x' on my calendar. it felt like a sin.

unlike other sins, however, it was not even slightly enjoyable in any guilty way. it was just straight up bad. and wrong. and all of the things that denote those things we are not supposed to do and then for no reason at all i did not do a thing and that was the undoing of it all. try running that around in your head all day while you debate whether or not to run around anything anyway.

truth of the matter was, and is, it was time. and i will soon figure out how to put some lessons that i learned into a good log about positive truths i came to know, but in the meantime, i just felt kinda rotten and then faded away into a deep sleep. then i woke up this morning and felt even just a little bit hungrier for a few steps on cold pavement. toying with quitting was like a drug itself. just the concept of breaking some unwritten promise secreted a little bit of possibility pleasure in my brain.

when the routine is broken, of course, all hell breaks loose and it's never like it is in the movies. we stayed in from the group run the other night because the big kid was too tired to run. we didn't know what to do with ourselves. we ate too early, too much. we had hours of daylight and itchy bodies twitching with too much energy. it was a pileup and the evening, our casualty, staggered about aimlessly. we will not skip that plan again.

so tonight, my big kid is another year older. a decade and a bit ago she changed the world forever. tonight i will reflect on her and that change and when i grew up overnight. and i will do this in one of the only two places things make sense to me: on a run.