I went in without a camera so that I’d have to use my mind to remember and my words to later relay the sound of my feet on the long wooden walk hovering over still, green water -- nubs of cypress popping through, gathered like babies around the broad bases of moss-covered trunks that begin in some underwater nowhere, without single origin, just spreading wide and slow-mo’ through lowland pools and rupturing over time into the sky--a vast rhizome we cannot see beneath, with heads forty feet high poking into the clouds. The gracious return of springtime sun in South Carolina draws a sweetness out of the wet black-brown loam of the trail, our sneakers leaving stamps of civilization beside oval and palm-shaped leaves, alligator prints, and the early, sparse blossoms that strut in the breeze, a month before bugs and ferns crowd in and make a jungle of this place.
I have been running--for weeks? months? years now?--barely pausing to rinse the sweat and soil from my clothes and re-pack a bag. I’ve been hungrily collecting adventures, friends, factoids about cities; tallying exits and checking off states; enjoying the last sips late, late at night and peeing on wet grass outside the van in the early morning; I’ve been humbled and rejected and made proud and disappointed and drained and lifted up. And sometimes when I think I’ve been away for an eternity, I come home to find nothing has changed: the curtains are still tied back in the middle; the bank teller with the soft name and soft voice still doesn’t make eye contact; my dead dog’s cherry tree still stands weeping in the middle of the backyard; the vinyl player has collected some dust; the workers in hardhats are breaking for lunch again in the big hole they dug in the center of downtown, probably for another hotel or apartment complex; my neighbor rolls his empty recycling bin back down his driveway; none of the potholes have been patched; and the hipsters smoke cigs outside the coffee shop. I’ve aged and seen and slept too little and practiced yoga on beaches and in ashy corners of spare rooms. There is always sand in my suitcase, and I’m not sure from where. I return home to a stack of bills and two cars in need of repair and no money for any of it, but I’m building a thing (I swear.) And this callusing of skin, this shrugging off of misfortune, this sharpened adaptability, this acceptance of struggle paired with a ruthless, knuckle-down, ever-stretching tenacity are side effects of the drug, and I guess I wear them like a badge. Who do I need to shout at that this is not luck? That you can’t buy it, that I wouldn’t have had the dough anyway, and that nothing can take the place of years of motion while the heart stays scraped clean? That I am not safe but I’m happy? No one, really. When the need to prove falls away making room for the need to create, I’ll know I’ve been pushed into the sweet spot--backed into a corner, I don’t bear my teeth anymore; I’ve wedged my body in and spread my arms wide against the walls, waiting for the wind, the howl, the bite. And I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I’m delighted to be here.
What I wouldn’t give to have the silence sometimes to make sense of it all; to tell more about it, in chronological order--some faithfully-kept journal, organized and replete, the product of a daily regimen, even if it was just for me...maybe I should, still. But these days I prefer the business to the capture, so I’m tapped in and whirling around. I’ve missed dinners and baby showers and weddings and work and phone conversations with old friends wherein you’ve exhausted all the stories until you’re both left sighing. I’ve been running. Please forgive me what I’ve missed.
This year I’ve vowed to create more than I have in a long time. I need to release the fruit of my frustration with the world back into it; maybe it’ll help me but it’d be a lot better if it helped us. I think a lot of us do this: sometimes when I’m in a busy public place, I pluck out individual people and I try to imagine their whole life--the times they got in trouble as a child, their favorite foods, their guilty pleasures and much darker secrets, past lovers and the one that got away, their most red-faced embarrassing moment, the time they almost died by pulling out in front of a car they didn’t see, their graduation, a middle school notebook covered with doodles and band names, the time they got fired and how they still replay all the things they should have said, the birth of their first child… Whoever you are, whether I know you or we haven’t yet met or never get a chance to, I want to tell you that I’m proud to be part of your family. I see you trying. And even if I think you’re batshit crazy or you’re just an asshole or that your mama must have dropped you on your head to make you believe what you do, trust the best part of me that says I know we’re in it together, and that I sincerely hope you’re making the most of your brief time here. I’ve taken a short moment to ignore the screens that keep us away from each other, and I’ve been looking around to find you. There you are. (I’m right here too.) See me? I see you.