Beyond-ness.

Tonight I ran five miles.  I got started a bit late because I got pulled over for having a taillight out.  And then I made Ty's dinner, changed, and hit the road. I had already decided it was a Chris Pureka night, so I put her on shuffle.

I stopped to take pictures several times, but other than that, I ran it fast.  For me.  And I thought about words and smells and feelings.  I tried to hold them in my mind.

Up North First Street I was pushing hard.  I was running fast and pushing myself to keep it going.  My eyes were narrowed and the world was bumping up and down while I was smooth.  The stoplights in front of me jerked in time with my feet hitting the ground.  I pushed for my breath to hurt, to burn in my chest.  And I thought of sort of a word that captured what I was feeling at that moment.  I tried to catch it and hold onto  it, and I thought that I had.

But when I slowed down and started letting my thoughts wander, I came back looking for it and it was gone.  I pushed through my  brain for it, but it had left.  I only knew one thing to try--run fast again and see if I could find it.  So I did.  I increased my speed again, gritted, thought of determination and fuckitness and then, there it was---beyond-ness.  That feeling of being beyond in my body, beyond what is there when I'm not pushing hard, when the sidewalk is a tunnel and the song lyrics are mixing in poetry that I can't write.

Poetry that I can only run, a rhythm that played itself with my words and the lines from the song.  I can't write it because it only exists on that plane, that heartbeat, in that vein of pumping that is something like sex but only in certain moments, and not the climactic ones.  The ones that are made of sculpture, of instinct, of existence and not thinking-ness.

The last half mile I wanted to run fast enough to breathe hard, be out of breath, feel the heat of my chest catching at the air.  I told myself, open your mouth and the air will flow.  Just open your mouth and let your body breathe.  It knows how to breathe.  It was dark.  I was dark.

When I finished I put my hands on my knees for a minute and fished for the feeling.  Euphoria?  Warmth in my limbs, aliveness and power and a gloriously used feeling.  I walked the rest of the way home in a cocoon of spent exertion and felt like I could keep walking blindly on.  But, of course, I didn't.