Running Down Memory Lane

I go for a run today, first time in a long while. I go out to see what the pneumonia has done to my lungs.

This is after a haircut. This girl, she hasn’t cut my hair in two years. I was married then. I remember thinking in the pit of my loyalty that she was very pretty then, more pretty than
I find her now.

The way it’s easy to find somebody attractive in the absence of possibility.

Bad haircut, this hit or miss transaction.


..And the storm last night, thunder and lightning, then the ice—they call it hail—falling against the windows, the walls, like something that wanted in.

The streets filling up with water, the water muddy.

Dark. And quite aside from the weather.

It’s the kind of weather in which bad things happen.
If I had bad things in mind, if I were a bad person, this would be the night for me.

Hidden impulses invograted.

The kind of night for murder and museum robberies.

…I wear a hat when I run.
Not always, but fresh from my cut I do.
Pulled down on my face, that traveling shadow.

No butterflies today, the campus quiet, the green perfectly round, and those steps up which I can semi thunder.

…I remember a storm two years ago, Cartersville, that second wife, those few months of hope and maybe even beauty.

(There’s a picture of us from then.
We’re shirtless, embraced, and we’re kissing.
It’s accidentally beautiful.
And the only real proof I have.
Most of the time, I wish I didn’t).

The wind and the rain, Biblical.

We lit candles, but the house was too dark even with them.
The town itself was dark.

So we went driving.

Rain beating the windows. Water swelling up around the tires.

It seemed a dangerous night to drive, but we felt almost safe, the way it is at the amusement park, those rides meant to frighten, those rides from which, occasionally, people really do fall.

The streets deserted.
The houses appearing deserted.
The trees leaning over the roads.
Their branches on the ground, cracking under our tires.

Even the men in their blue lights out there working on the lines, they looked ominous in their overalls and hoods. Sparks flying in the water, faces masked. Hell’s maintenance.

…I go running today, the first time in months.
I like to run. But more, I want to know what’s left of me.

It takes me almost ten minutes longer then it did the last time I ran. But it is a good run, liberating somehow.

This pretty day. In this sun after the storm, my skin pale enough to make a Renaissance woman swoon.

…And I remember my first or second blog came after a run.

None of you were with me then.

I remember what I wrote, that what I need was not exercise, but therapy.

I’m different now.
(Though still in need of therapy).
The way I’m different than yesterday.
(But only from a true artist of the craft, a near genius, not just somebody with a degree)
Most change, it is not sudden.

Most change, you can’t see it even with a stop frame camera.

That late summer, early fall.

Everything was hard then, the ground, my flesh, my heart.

It’s muddy today, my new shoes sinking in the ground.
My lungs, they’re soft, my flesh too.

Pain focuses me. Makes me hard.

What to do with ease, what to do in the calm after storms, when you’re heart’s not fully broken…?

…There was a girl in the front seat of a white limo. It was half in the street and half in a yard.

That was that night in Cartersville when we went driving around, that second wife and me, tourists in a world gone dark and wet, with the radio playing and the heat coming out and the dashboard lights on our faces.

That world we thought we knew but could hardly recognize.

Coming up that narrow street, through that bad neighborhood.

The limo a bit in the yard of that house, a place you imagined people buying drugs and things less savory, it’s broken porch, the men you’d see there in the day, riding past on your bicycle, riding fast.

The limo was white but dirty.

She was thin, sitting alone in the dark of the front seat of it.
The house was even darker than the other dark houses.
Her shoulders were bare.

The lights washed over her and she looked blank and then scared, wearing a thin dress or maybe just a slip, very white, this girl, and young. Her hair blond.

I can see her better now than anything.

What we said to each other, that wife and I, in this moment just before or just after our beauty proven or at least illusioned in a photo, what we said after the headlights had moved past that girl was that she was in trouble.

But we did not stop. We did not get out.

This is a safari, but the animals can still eat you.

Stay in your world and I’ll stay in mine.

…I feels good this run, this post storm proof of survival.
The ground squishy.
The sun warm
I feel strong making it Maybe I don’t have the courage of kick at the end, but I’m happy with myself, coming through the door.

Like nothing can make me not live.

… We went home then, after the girl in the limo.

That night, in the candles, in the absence of tv, of any kind of noise that wasn’t the weather, what did we do, that wife and I, with the rain on our walls and the darkness pervading?

What did we do when we came in, took off our wet jackets, sprung those matches?

It was just us then, us and the dog that is now dead, and I imagine, because I cannot remember, that we could all hear each other breathe.

I try to remember, I try to imagine. That night in the house against the storm, what we did, if we whispered, how we looked.

L Cohen writes, “Let’s be alone together/let’s see if we’re that strong”.