Fifty miles west of Bloomington lies
Hillsboro, a monument to middle-class malaise. Fern covered front porches with
white picket fences settle impervious to everything, but flags, harvests and
lemonade stands. A sense of yesterday lingers in each neighborhood where attics
house button downed memories folded away in massive trunks. Children laugh on
summer afternoons and winter mornings, as school bells and church bells peal.
That morning she decided to go for a
run. It was not her typical decision. Usually, after she had gotten both
husband and children off to their various destinations, she would sit down for
another cup of coffee, a peek at Dr. Phil or a long drag on a pencil she
pretended was a cigarette holder.
Today was different.
Today she had glanced at something that encapsulated every lost dream and every
lost desire sacrificed on the altar constructed by teenagers and maintained by
adults. It was just something written by an unknown name, but just the same, it
struck her and echoed throughout the washing of dishes and folding of clothes.
Somewhere
right now, in the heartland of America, in the subterranean reaches of a city,
a man is running.
She searched like a mad man for her old pair of
sneakers. She didn’t have running shoes, but decided that tomorrow she would
splurge. But for now, what she had would have to do. One of the laces snapped
in half when she pulled her bow tight. Yesterday that would have been enough to
stop her, but today she ran into her son’s room, pulled the lace off of one of
his shoes and laced her own.
There was a list of errands waiting to be completed
hanging on the corkboard by the door, when she stepped outside into the morning
sun and exhaled the air with the same joy as someone who had been confined for
years. Every care dissipated while one remained:
“Only a thin veil separates me from everything and
everyone I love or have ever loved.”
She stepped
onto the pavement feeling its hardness beneath her feet, while knowing that
beneath her and through the grass, dirt and rock, was another woman, on the
other side of the world, going to bed at the end of the day sighing as dreams
blossomed from nothingness, only to die with the sun.
Bending down to touch the
earth, she believed, even for that moment, that she could touch the face of
that sleeping woman to let her know that she was not alone.
Her first steps were awkward. She hadn’t run in
years and soon realized that her body had lost the ease of youth. As she bent
down to stretch and feel the groan of unused muscles, she knew that this dream
would take every bit of her strength to breathe.
“It’s almost like giving birth,” she thought, as one
again, she began.
This time her steps felt more assured of their
placement, one behind the other with a quick gait that became more powerful
with each movement. She quickened her pace.
She was running.
Her
feet thumped the pavement like worries. She ran though no one was in pursuit.
An echo from some past dream had awakened an urgency that dragged her from the
subterranean reaches of complacency to frenzy.
Her
heart pounded, though not so much out of exhaustion, as joy.
She
ran like an outcast from some forgotten place. The sky was yellow when she’d
begun and red by the time she realized that the landscape of her life had
changed from poised and positioned to free.
Fifty miles east of Bloomington is
Normal, a straitjacket to conformity, where everything and nothing is what it
is to those who live there. As she approached it boundary, she wondered if she
should return. Her husband needed her. Her children needed her.
“No, I’m going to run past Normal,” she
thought after taking a break to eat a lunch of sweet cakes, honey and black
olives before returning to the road.
Manna
never tasted so sweet.
She
had found her stride and whooshed past blurs of people, houses, life as one
border zoomed into another.
There
was an undertow of exigency like a nagging pulse forcing lifeblood itself through
her tired veins. She was not adroit at running; tripping on rocks and troubles
with equal clumsiness. But she always righted herself before tramping on. There
was a candle in the window of a curious little house that she passed along the
Cape Fear Coast.
She
smiled at the odd symmetry of running in circles, though the earth is a circle
so we are all running.
There
were many who came and went along the way. She had slowed down for some and
hurried past for others. Others waved or winked, while others frowned and threw
stones. It would be a lie to say she had not lost her step on occasion, but she
redeemed herself from the sins of imperfection and returned to her former course,
wiser and well trod. She had d loved and been loved though she could not stay
put. Chased by monkeys at a temple in India where the moss grew high among
darkened trees, she laughed as she remembered that just yesterday she had been
bored.
The
faces of her husband and children appeared and disappeared in storefronts and
horizons. Longitudinally speaking, she was usually silent except for the huffs
and puffs of air she released unconsciously.
An
old woman gave her orange slices that were dripping with juice. She ran through
terrain familiar to both the Jewish and the Gentile troubling ancient dust with
peaceful steps. There were children laughing in Gaza and children laughing in
the heartland of America. Effigies of forgotten political figures hung from
pole to pole with no one lifting up a gun or setting off a bomb in retaliation.
The
world revolved as it always had been since before the beginning.
Yet
she continued to run past and through consciousness amid cavalcades of
recklessness and ruin. She had begun her passage with carelessness as her
mapmaker and knew that she wouldn’t end it until oblivion closed her eyes. But
that wouldn’t be for years yet. Now there was only the road before and after
her with nothing between them but eternity, and the smiles of children playing
in the dirt.
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