2025-03-14
Yesterday I ran outside for the first time in a while. This past summer, when I stopped being able to feel the sun beaming down on my chest and when the wind began to wrap around my body and felt more like a clash rather than a lingering kiss, I relegated myself to the treadmill. I preferred it that way, I told myself. And it was nice, but you hop on and time dilates, stretches out and expands while simultaneously compressing its intensity. It's controlled: there's no wind to mess up my hair or elicit tears from my eyes.
It was cold and windy when I ran outside yesterday. My hair was pressed back, my nose running. I was back home from school--spring break--and ran through my town, starting at my house, moving to the high school, middle school, elementary school, and back again. Time had the same compressive effect--those ten minute blocks dissolved into the nothingness of the past faster than I could acknowledge them--but the spatial element impresses on the mind more so than running suspended in place. I've teared up in thought while running on the treadmill. I've shut my eyes and rested my mind mid stride. There's a part of the brain that remains dormant on the treadmill, however hard it struggles to awaken with hungry glances looking to steal some form of stimulation from the room's motionless confines.
I read Universal Truths by Shira Haus. She writes, "Pebbles jeweled the sidewalk like pomegranate seeds". She interrupts her own memories, "—I can’t languish here". I wish I could do the same. As I was running through the streets of my own memories, I noticed the pebbles too, although I didn't have the language to describe it then. When I cut open a pomegranate and rip it open, that moment of transformation--to destroy what it is now, to transform it into what it will be then--always leaves some seeds on the floor. I think I've been even more careless with the pomegranate embodying my life in its seeds, now strewn across sidewalks and roads. I step on them. I feel the give of the potent skin crush beneath my feet and flatten, dismally, outwards in an irrevocable undoing.
It's nice to run where you're familiar. I can make adjustments to my route at a whim. The route does not incite a feeling of trepidation, but a reflexive--encoded into my very motor schemas--instinct to continue forward and forward. But the treadmill isn't littered with my pomegranate seeds. I don't have to step on my memories to propel my body forward, to acknowledge the person who used to walk here against the person who tramples on the consecrated ground now. A proximity to death usually reinvigorates the full fleetingness of life. I think this extends to memories as well. An encounter with my memories, encapsulating my old selves, is its own type of mourning. It reminds me of what I am not and makes me appreciate who I am, in this continuous cycle of dissolution and generation.