Run, girl, run.
Glaring white-on-black-on-white. Crystalline drifts meeting filthy slushy sidewalks meeting snow-choked roads and bitter-blackened patches of asphalt. Along the route, the shadows of tree branches intertwine, interlace, gently paling fingers against the bright-white snowpack, made dense by footfall throughout the day. Shoe patterns emerge, boots and sneakers and here and there a worn bike tire tread, signs of life before my shuffling footfalls along this way. The world in its glaring polarity seems flattened, vanquished, as if the snow came down and rooted itself in so deeply it pulled its surroundings down into the earth, and we all became a part of one dimension. I shuffle a bit more hastily, dragging out my breaths in their usual one-two-three-one-two-three waltz-like pattern. Even after so long not running, my breath and pace return with ease, glide in like old friends who’ve strayed far too long. My body checks in. Heart, okay, lungs, unhappy but okay, shoulders need to loosen, body is too tight, needs to untense itself. Needs to remember. Remember the roads that stretched over 26 miles or so, the disheartening end that one long run finally had to come to. The times it did more. The times it did almost as much. The time it will do nowhere near as much, this time, this place, it needs to know, it can relax.
Relax.
Pressure’s off. Nobody’s watching, timing, looking, shouting, waving cheering or even mildly interested in what you’re doing. Anyone else out who even notices you on this godforsaken evening might raise their eyebrows a bit, might be inclined to ponder your mildly questionable sanity, but that’s the most they’ll do. If they even notice. The little runner in black pants and a white jacket, shuffling along the moonscape-like linear dimension of this eerily false winter-world. The goal is simple, driven by a direct and basic need. To run. To run. To run!!!
It simply had to be done, it simply had to be accommodated. After eight p.m. be damned, the body simply had no will left for the runaway mind, already out playing footfalls along the vacant paths, the distant wilderness, the opaque red-grey sky, its charcoal flatness blistered by wraiths of smoke from woodburning fireplaces, thousands of them lit and stoked all over town tonight. The body would not but the mind could. Would. And eventually, had to.
Run, girl, run. Get out there into that flattened skyscape, that planar world you long to be in, melt into, absorb, hold inside. Hold it in. And run.
