Come, let us peel back the mind in a moment of freedom and fury and see what we can find.
To me, to run is to be free. Free of the mind’s wants and needs. It is to grow a pair of wings, lend them to the wind that it might lift you out of the present world for a time. It’s an escape and a release. I find myself building up so much energy throughout the day, through restless longing or toe-tapping worry or the jitterings of leftover caffeine. And I feel you ought to know, through anger too—formed like a jagged, decadent palace full of golden frames in its dark halls, paintings of pain and fire. It’s a result of my pride, I think; but I’ve also been told it’s because of love. If this is true, it must be a selfish love. Some inseparable mixture of temper and passion stirs not against any one person, but against the world. Whatever the cause, it burns through my blood, escaping in beads of sweat while I rage against the heat and rage against the sun and it rages against me and everything I feel is raging and free.
The loop of music I set—now bright, now furious, swelling and crashing, painting and burning—lends itself to the colors in the sky and the eyes of my mind. The notes wind through my limbs and into my heart, strike the rhythmic, steady beat. My breath is clear, constant. I smile to myself; I can’t help it. Here the mind unwinds its tangled pile of garden hoses. The forever knotted string of headphones, looped free to set the magic spinning. As the music fades within my heartbeats, within the matched pounding, feet flying across the concrete, lightly and forcefully at once, a great key turns somewhere inside of me, and all my wild, unfiltered emotions and dreams come pouring out in one great storm and swell of ecstatic fury.
The world is swimming in unreality, nowhere more visceral than here perhaps, when given a soundtrack. All is ever-changing; ever beautiful and ever deadly. I soar through legends, waging wars with kings and queens and paranormal beasts. The sweat running down my arm turns to drops of crimson blood. In the breaths of reality I draw between the seams, I can feel my everyday worries winding themselves out of their own accord. They melt into obscurity; I feel near invincible. Death itself could be at my heels, black robes gathered up like a skirt, and still it couldn’t catch me. My shadow flips in the sun, drawn out before me, and I in my black, sailing through the wind—I could be the grim reaper, stretching out my own clawed hand. This is young and foolish of me, I know. Death could most certainly catch me here, if it wanted to. And would I meet it like a friend, or resist it till the end?
The dark angel appears often in my visions, as do other omniscient guardians of life. Truth and Time. The regulars. They stand at the edges of my vision, posing riddles from their golden-fire eyes and clockwork minds. Following them come ancient gods, shifting in the earth. Hades, veiled in the deepest shadows of the undergrowth. Artemis, sprinting through the forest at my side; Apollo, prancing in the sunlight. Hermes, ever-graceful, wings fluttering from his feet. Swaying in a drunken breeze, the careless, flowering Persephone. And looming in the rolling fists of clouds, the mighty, capricious Zeus. What do they observe? What do they squabble and dictate about the world? Do they note the path stretching out before me? Can they see where it will end? Or do they even offer a second glance, too busy orchestrating their grand schemes for the universe? I will prove myself, I think. I will prove myself to them. To the great poets who composed their tales long before I was born. I will prove myself to their ghosts. And, to the world.
Invariably, these constructs melt away, out of the clouds and landscape, replaced by thoughts of a God not bound by time or history or any fears of men. The clouds illuminate as from within, an ever-in-motion painting with intertwining strokes. Violet and crimson and velvet gold. Sunlight dances across a stage, throwing its form back in an arc of glory. It glistens, pools of blood-fire in the grass; resilience rushes through me. I am simultaneously humbled and reaffirmed. Sometimes running is an act of worship.
Once my limbs respond without feeling, my pace becomes a steady pulse, and I trust it to hold until the end. The sky softens to a flowery orange and rose. The trail winds back into a local neighborhood. Some of its houses meet the edge of the path. I try to pay them little mind; they depress me. American flags wave from white porches over every prim front lawn. But their rocking chairs sway empty, and through the windows, every living room lights up with a screen. I see ghosts in the yard, homely and smiling. Waving to each other, neighbors frozen in a bygone era. Relics of the past century.
I round the final bend, meet one last expanse of sky and trees. My chest kicks internally for rest, the nearness of the end inspiring a certain degree of desperation. But this is arguably my favorite bit. My legs react in turn, as though questioning how fiercely I might push myself to reach the self-imposed finish line. The music stirs up another romp through the bloodstream; it rockets the entire pace of the world into a frenzy.
The sun bursts at the horizon line, a final flame of farewell. The earth blurs to oblivion, alights in shades of fire. Something in me turns feral, brutally heartless and full of mirth. I stretch out my wings, pour out my heart. I in my radiant, reckless revels, I am a Greek myth all my own. Abandon grows until there is room for nothing else. The reincarnation of the son of Helios, driving my father’s chariot across the dawn. A modern-day Icarus, flying too close to the sun. Sprinting headlong into its roaring, glittering arms. Hurling myself out the other side reborn. A moment of terrible, fiery freedom. To me it is always worth the price of falling back to earth. Wings singeing, souls singing, never more certain they’re alive—like Icarus, like Phaethon, I too must inevitably come crashing down.
The sky inhales, sucking the fire back into its chest. My legs pull back beneath the shadows of the town courthouse. Fountains giggle quietly. Music mutters from a bar around the corner. The world is still; the world is as I left it. Dreary, comforting, intact.
I collapse on an iron bench and wait for my heartbeat to return to its regular rhythm—to come back down from my speed high. Sweat rolls off my limbs and hair like drops of candle wax. I have only the strength to observe my surroundings. Every breath, another piece of the blank expanse. Patches of sky between the willows. Tiny lights wrapped around the trees in golden rows. Strangers fade between the bricks and lampposts. They pass like ghosts through a realm of my own.
Once the haze evaporates, I set a song on my iPod. A quiet number, one that colors the dusk in peace. Carpe diem fluxes to a lullaby. The day is seized, has dissolved in my palm, like an ephemeral drop of the sun’s diamond blood. Now what am I left to hold? I suppose I must return to reality. I say that like I have a choice.
I peel myself from the bench and begin to walk away from the lamp-lit streets. Brick pathways jut uneven beneath my tired feet. The memory of sunlight thrums in my veins.
The self-swinging gate grants my return with a low, mournful squeal. It is a startled, intrusive sound; the symphony of the world quiets once the sun is gone. The shadows swallow me whole. The gate clangs shut.
I face the entrance to the neighborhood park—a grove of broad trees draped with silver moss that reign over a wide, jewel black lake. The trees summon in silent calls. I hang a right instead, beginning a lazy stagger down the loop of palm tree palaces. Usually I keep to the sidewalk. But the streets are deserted and the sky is that smoky twilight blue I love so well and there seems to be a certain allure of power in walking down the middle of the pavement. So I do. And the sky unfurls its wonder as though it wants to welcome me in an incorporeal embrace and make up for this world that cannot.
Disrupting the blue are nearly-twinned rows of black zig-zag roofs. Each structure in the neighborhood—to call them homes feels instinctively off-putting—has only just enough personality to separate it from its siblings that the whole community feels uncanny in the dark. Though made of brick and dull shades of sandstone, they all turn a pale sort of green in the damp haze of dusk.
As I make my way around the loop, it is not this pallor of green alone that inspires the neighborhood’s particular aura of loneliness. Statues stand guard in various courtyards: Demeter, holding a sheaf of wheat; Cupid, one leg above the ground, bow at the ready; twin stone lions, resolute and solemn. Another land of monsters and gods. They share the same eyes as their homes. Hollow. Blank. Listless. Staring not at me—not at anything. They merely gaze, empty and unrevealing, into the unaffected soul of the night. Of these ninety-some, two-story shells, only a handful are lit from within. Even then, the lights buzz in squares of white or pink or violet. Screens, blinking tirelessly into the darkness.
The rest of the houses loom vacant and cold. Chandeliers, unlit, glisten through their halls’ upper windows. All deserted, as far as I know. Are they second homes? Winter escapes for when it grows too cold up north? Funny though, I don’t remember seeing them occupied a few months ago. It hardly matters. I rarely see anyone—and never after the sun has set.
A patch of living darkness soars over my head—an owl, familiar enough from my wanderings to be considered a friend. I leave behind the dumb deities of stone and soaring palm trees that almost give one the impression of living at the bottom of a fishbowl. I leave them and wander into the park, which is similarly lonely and cold, but only slightly less so.
The owl coos from somewhere in the trees’ lofty regions. Curtains of moss dangle in the dark but without the sigh of a wind to make them stir. My feet are naturally drawn to the lake, which mirrors what golden lights spark about its rim. Across the way I spot my own darkened home. Beside it glares a single upper window, lit a harsh, violent orange. A chorus of unsettling notes echoes in my mind. I rip my gaze back to the lake and its far horizon line. Like swaths of dark magic and glory at play, the sky melts into a numinous green-blue.
I used to wander in these lucid dream-states at school. The grounds were no less shadowed but imbued with a sense of living things where at first glance offered only trees and stone. There such quiet and still was spiritual, a sense that this private world knew me, knew my heart. And not only that, but that it rose to meet me in my wondrous fantasies and was therefore, in some part, my own. Here, it is a similar world—small, encompassed, remote—but one from which I feel barred. Looked down upon by every lifeless home. All of them seemingly haunted, yet without any souls to drift about. Unless I am that ghost. Ironic, no? Haunting the streets as I am haunted myself.
A swell of separation crests through me. I tilt my head back, offer myself to the sky. That infinite, reliable well of creation. The richest colored sea; such beautiful treachery. I am betrayed again. Though I give myself up to it, still I do not fall.
I reach with the ache in my heart, the deep despair of longing, for the night to come alive—to blossom in my mind. I ought to will my wild whims into being as I’ve done in the past. But they do not respond. In truth, though I’ve tried on many nights, they have never responded—not here. I can rage against the dying light all I like. This kingdom of hollowed out palaces, with its grand iron gate and softly stirring lake—even when bathed in the lovely depth of the twilight’s expanse—at its core, finds no soul of its own.
So why am I unable to fill it with my soul? Perhaps it is the empty homes. Perhaps it is this sense of the incorporeal, a ghost’s inability to do more than brush against the world. Still maybe it is the calm after the storm, dreams spent after pouring them out on my run. This night surrounding me is not the breathing type, but I feel a sinister whisper brushing at the back of my neck. What if it is something else? Something darker and more permanent? An unspoken fear brought to life—a fading by degrees, night after night. As though only after the world’s turned black would I be able to tell I went blind.
I plead to the heavens with my eyes. I cry to the sky with my mind. Do not abandon me to this fate. Do not suffer me to this dome—this too-natural, best-one-can-hope-for state. I shut my eyes and listen.
I don’t know who conveys the response. The stars, the owl, some great monster churning up from the depths. But there comes a voice.
Then do not accept.
I draw a clear, quiet breath and feel a lone spark bobbing on a sea of muted beauty. Liquid starlight fills my raised, imaginary glass. A toast, to the night. May I not forget that to settle is to die. To accept one’s given fate is to resign yourself to it. As long as there are words in my soul and fire in my veins, may this not be any fate of mine. To find a mansion under a darkening sky and to its spell of sleep resign. I may feel myself misplaced, but that which is lost may be found again. I knock my glass back and drink in the starlight, then hurl the empty vessel into the deep. Huzzah. I may yet dance wild and free.
The trees slouch further into the earth, unimpressed. I rock back and forth on my heels, a boat drifting somewhere between peace and unrest. Out of the dark come a series of words my friend once gave to me.
Do you remember the last time you noticed yourself fading? I sure hope not. I can never remember if it feels like I’m lighter, or if I’m wearing weights. Either way, I don’t like it. But then again, I don’t think anyone does. Funny, huh?
Have we all experienced something like this? And do we grind against it, throwing our heads back into the blue-green, plunging into the mysteries of the deep? Or do we relinquish and let it be?
I stand at the edge of the lake, listening to the chaotic swell of a symphony, watching the starry freckles glitter on the waves, and let myself think about nothing for a change. Then—and only then—once the sky fades to black and the song to the echo of a memory, I turn and walk back to my house, knowing full well I’ve reached the end of my fall from the sun and returned to reality.
§
Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là.
— Victor Hugo
a literary labyrinth 