to work the straw
this morning i woke up and ran for the first time in five years. i pulled on my varsity shorts and an old race t-shirt, ratty shoes that used to belong to someone else, and i went as if i had no choice, as if it should have been obvious for the past five years that i could do this any time i wanted. it was jarring at first, clumsy. heavy legs, shaky feet, no flow to it, just confusion in my body, rigid strides that never seemed to complete themselves. it didn't feel like it once did. but the sun was bright, and the cool september air burning in my lungs felt good somehow. it felt pure.
i put in a few days of yardwork for my ex-girlfriend's mom, sunday and tuesday, pulling tangled ropes of ivy from the earth, just ripping out haystack-sized piles of this thing that chokes everything else out. i noticed it then, too: there is something uniquely gratifying about intense physical exertion, especially when all the chips are down, when everything seems to be falling apart. you come in filthy, smelling of grass stains and dirt, your forearms are scratched and burning, your fingers and your back are cramping up, but you feel cleansed. if you can do nothing for yourself, it helps to know that you can at least work at something, at anything. at least you can feel that blood is pumping through your veins, that your body is occupying space, that you are alive.
after a steady tightening of the clamps, the pain leveled out, and i could float through that fiberglass feeling in my chest, and i felt a little of it coming back. i could almost smell it, that smell of races in the fall, that smell that comes with clean sweat and crushed leaves, balding grass under a stampede of flashing feet. the smell of going fast, with no vehicle except your legs and the miles they've run.
i cursed every cigarette i'd ever smoked.
i looped slowly around the old apartment building on cora and cut through to holgate, headed for the park on powell, wishing i were faster, wishing i could run for thousands of miles.
...
debbie, if you can hear me, thank you. for everything.
i put in a few days of yardwork for my ex-girlfriend's mom, sunday and tuesday, pulling tangled ropes of ivy from the earth, just ripping out haystack-sized piles of this thing that chokes everything else out. i noticed it then, too: there is something uniquely gratifying about intense physical exertion, especially when all the chips are down, when everything seems to be falling apart. you come in filthy, smelling of grass stains and dirt, your forearms are scratched and burning, your fingers and your back are cramping up, but you feel cleansed. if you can do nothing for yourself, it helps to know that you can at least work at something, at anything. at least you can feel that blood is pumping through your veins, that your body is occupying space, that you are alive.
after a steady tightening of the clamps, the pain leveled out, and i could float through that fiberglass feeling in my chest, and i felt a little of it coming back. i could almost smell it, that smell of races in the fall, that smell that comes with clean sweat and crushed leaves, balding grass under a stampede of flashing feet. the smell of going fast, with no vehicle except your legs and the miles they've run.
i cursed every cigarette i'd ever smoked.
i looped slowly around the old apartment building on cora and cut through to holgate, headed for the park on powell, wishing i were faster, wishing i could run for thousands of miles.
...
debbie, if you can hear me, thank you. for everything.