Savage Innocence

(For Boston.)

If one listens to the echo of footsteps strike against pavement in rapid succession and nothing else but the inhale and exhale of breath for long enough, the outside world in which one moves careens away, sudden-like. In the midst of the anxiety of being that presses down upon the chest, of watching the ground disappear beneath, of running up and over hills, past innumerable trees that reach skeleton limbs to the sky, one becomes nothing but muscle ache, nothing but intake of oxygen, nothing but forward momentum.

My father instilled the motto in me, but it came from his brother, from his mother, from his father before him, from their Marine Corps tough that did not wane, even in old age: “Run it off.”

When we first began to run together, those brief yet eternal distances, it was a children’s rhyme in the comfort of my father’s voice.

When I fell and cut my knee, as he wiped off the blood: “Get up, run it off.”

It became a pillar of support in adolescence: “Who gives a fuck what they say? Run it off.”

When my father’s own father died sudden and the hourly reminder from the grandfather clock in the hallway forced my involuntary sobs, it was a eulogy.

When everything was broken one night in the blur of a drunken sixteen-year-old’s nightmare of a man looming over and into and when that nightmare became my eternal shadow, it was visceral survival.

When I gave up on survival, when the giving up failed, when I vomited charcoal and awoke dream-like and drugged, then walked outside two weeks later, it was one foot, then the other, and the cold wind on my face.

When I awoke, adult and grown, and knew that these were only the first tragedies and that many more would come between those cherished moments of grace that were true and real and nothing but color, it was the ace in my pocket.

It was every hard thing that ever happened and the only response there was. It was the way resilience feels: a steel coating over every fragile organ and the blood-pumping drumbeat reminder beneath the ribs that the living kept on, that the shaking only steadied.

“Run it off.”

I am hard now and determined – possessed of a fierceness masked solely by gentle demeanor and the type of tough that can only be got by the survival of deep suffering – but I was not always. I was rice paper fragile in my early years. In that time before I wore my alligator skin armor, before it took tensile strength to break me, I was deeply naive and easily broken. But even now, I am always running and often running away.

In the heavy night air a few days ago, as our feet drunk-wove our bodies toward home, a friend’s defensive voice beside me said something like: “Running away is pathetic. Running away is weak.”

But the deep and inescapable urge to run does not come from fear, and to understand it, one must first meet a threshold of pain that cannot be defined in any quantitative way.

The running does not come from a trembling inside. It does not come from the heartbeat skip, the adrenaline rush, the blood run cold, or the breath caught short. It rises in a rolling-boil rage that can’t be shook by still or comfort.

And with each stride, a little piece of the world that suffocates and weighs so heavy, a little piece of the world from which I hide my authentic self (that self comprised of all the shattered pieces that I have haphazard-glued back together with sheer will) falls away. My feet punch and bruise and maul my small corner of the universe, over and over, again and again, until it bleeds from every crevice. And then, the anger falls away too.

I am left with nothing but the running – the running of distances that grow longer and longer – into everything that is still unknown. Into what will be.

It is enough, now, that my feet move. It is enough, now, that I can feel them.