I must run, from every little thing that bothers me about this universe, there's really no other way to cope but to keep moving. And you learn that on the road. It's the kind of get-up-get-up-get-up-now that has you focusing on yourself, on stretching that muscle, moving that leg, lifting that other leg, slapping the concrete, chopping the air. In the real world it's easy to pretend to keep moving when it's really just variants of standing still.
Don't get it now, but try running. Or anything, actually, that requires you to moooove it. I'm not quite in tune with my body, so when it starts talking to me it tells me a great many things. It says, you have great shoulders, man, just right for the arms to keep slicing the air without bumping into your boobs, which, by the way, are just the perfect size to never get in the way, or to hurt in a show-stopping manner. It says, man, you should hunt down and kiss that therapist who fixed your foot, which used to harbor this secret pain for years, a pain you sort of just accepted as a minor inconvenience until one day it's gone and now walking is like walking on the treadmill: effortless, almost frictionless, easy.
It says, man, your lungs have a history on all their own, years of bronco-pneumonia (reverse asthma) and nebulizers and no-aircon buses and they're still there. Hard-up and struggling but, man, they're working overtime and they're loving it. Air!, they say, there are cells in there that haven't gotten as much oxygen as they do when you run.
It say, man, your blood's been waiting for years to feel alive again. Everything else--that job change, that brush with forever, that post-tragedy despair--all that turns figurative. This, this is breathing again.
(Note on August 12, 2012: This was originally posted on
my Tumblr. I'm doing some online
housekeeping and I figured I'd leave my Tumblr out of the drama and
corral introspective shit here. I left my blog last August of
2009 but I've reemerged somewhere between that and this.)
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