August 2023 - Random Musings
I'd be a liar if I didn't say I had tremendous doubts. I think about how hard it feels doing something a quarter of this difficulty and then compounding it with zero rest in between.
I can't decide if the scariness makes it better or worse.
I will always feel like I've never enough for this kind of thing. There is no real way to practice, and I'm not a high mileage runner, so I just feel all these doubts.
I definitely feel like a poser headed into this race. Maybe others have similar feelings? I dunno. I don't feel that way generally about most races any longer. Road marathons, timed races, flattish 100s, I've done those. I feel like I belong.
This is the kind of stuff that feels intimidating.
Which I think as a runner can be exciting in some ways. I'm trying something I'm not really sure if I will succeed. I've been scarred by DNFs. so while I want to always be shooting to finish, I don't want that to mar my experience in general. To be able to go run these mountains, at this race, and hang out in a beautiful alpine town with a couple of my close friends is the gift. The icing on the cake will be to finish the damn thing.
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I careen through the forest, my footsteps nearly silent. The green swallows the narrow ribbons of dirt. There is a steep and rocky incline to my left with trees jutting high and wide enough to create a canopy of shade. My body veers towards the incline as I run, staying away from the sheer drop to my right.
On the good days, I can skip over roots and rocks with ease, nary a pause for obstacles. My legs feel strong and effortless as I float down the trail. As much as I enjoy the company and conversation of a companion, it's when I'm alone that I feel the most free.
In those rare instances that fear is outweighed by pleasure, I let gravity do the work. It's hard to put into words the feeling when my mind is completely shut off and my body is at play.
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Some days I feel as though I have it under control and that while it’s still back there whirling in my brain, I am just going about my life rather easily. I wonder if over time that it will become such an iota of a memory that I will no longer care.
Or will it sit there, staring at me like those moments that no matter how long time stretches, are still following me around. The taste of ipecac mixed with saltiness of soy sauce and mushrooms. The suffocatingly warm stairwell of a Manhattan hotel, the danger obscured by my own self-hatred. A stormy night of Norah Jones and a bottle of YellowTail that couldn’t drown my sadness, no matter how much I drank. Sitting halfway across the world with my head physically pounding, feeling the sharp edges of someone else’s sadness and wanting us both forget for just one night.
The shame marred in excuses of others, but my brokenness has always been there.
If my own expectations are high, just think about how you’ll never be able to reach the ones I set for you. Any achievement feels like it still drips with disappointment.
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I watch my ghost ship, wondering all the what ifs in those other lives. I'm drawn to stories about rewriting our own paths, full of time machines and portals and an endless supply of outcomes. It's easier to believe in parallel dimensions when we are free to imagine all the paths that we could have chosen. I've taken leaps of faith, throwing a hail mary to my future self and hoping it all works out. So far, I've managed to escape death and jail, but maybe come a little too close to both at times.
My ghost ships are all there making their own journeys. Some getting swallowed up by storms. Some wandering aimlessly for years upon years. Some washing ashore too soon. All are full of heartache and beauty and pain and joy.
They are full of joyful independence, full of children, full of grief, and full of loneliness. They are happy marriages and tumultuous ones. They are divorce and widowing and rekindling. They are homelessness, fame, wealth, storied careers, and parades of dead-end jobs. They are ended abruptly at age 22, long with chronic illness, and uneventful until age 99. They are ripe with intense and unwavering spirituality and also decades of changing religions as often as the sheets.
They are suburbia with picket fences, vagabonds in vans, brownstones in concrete jungles, couches of friends, acres in the country, ramshackle apartments, and perhaps, a houseboat. They are drinks too much, eats too much, desires too much, lies, cheats, steals. They are kind, forgiving, loving, volunteering, giving. They take lavish vacations and skip meals to save money. They know how to code, perform open heart surgery, perform for a crowd, edit a manuscript, shoot up heroin, shoot a gun, shoot the shit.
They etch their stories into thousands of lives and yet, they all end in ashes and dust.
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Where Have All the Cowboys Gone and AC cranked on high. Driving around in the warehouse district, the afternoon so warm and I'm carrying around a sweatshirt everywhere. I should be hanging out with my friends somewhere, listening to this song in someone's bedroom, analyzing the lyrics or talking about the hijinks of the night prior. But instead, I'm welcoming getting back in the warm car with my mom, despising how cold every building is in late summer.
The stories when I feel the most broken come tumbling out easy now. It seems strange that in those years that I can easily pluck out a memory from that exact space in time. The summer of '97 in particular. So much time to myself. Which was dangerous in so many ways. I should have been having weeklong sleepovers with my girlfriends, catching the latest blockbuster at the movies, and falling in and out of love with each passing week.
The summers seemed longer then. The weeks stretched endlessly and without anyone to share them with, I dove further away from the outside world. I remember eating peaches as slowly as clock drug on. Their cold, juicy sweetness the antithesis of that hot, awful summer. I’d walk for hours early in the morning, the humidity drenching my skeletal body. Running wasn’t allowed, but walking was and I, of course, took it to the extreme.
I could only be mad at myself for it was me who made the decision to shrink myself into oblivion. What began as a mild transformation, fighting off puberty and desperately wishing to fit in, took a dangerous turn. People talk about having an addictive personality. I don’t know if that’s actually a thing, but I did easily slip into the madness. And often find myself a little too close to compulsive behaviors.
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Is there such a thing as drinking too much champagne? I'm not talking alcoholic levels, but drinking it often enough that it loses its celebratory meaning. I don't know that we celebrate enough.
A gorgeous day. A beautiful run. Making it through another week of work, of a complicated situation, a health scare. A clean to do list. The lawnmower starting up in the spring. A day with sunshine and an evening of rain. 10 hours of sleep. Porch coffee. A really great read. A good hair day. Car repairs done in my own garage. A motherfucking PR. Birthdays, of course.
