Poems From My Mostly Dark Places

2 - Run

01/19/2015

Today, for the first time in nearly six years, my chest aches with it.

I thought, after all this time, I wouldn’t be able to recognize this feeling. I figured it should be like seeing someone for the first time in ten years, glancing at them, trying to place them, but not really being able to do it until days later, after the chance to identify them is long past the point of relevance. That’s what it should feel like.

Instead, it feels like I’ve never left that place. Like years haven’t passed. Like I haven’t grown as a person and healed. Like I still have a reason to run.

This feeling in my chest claws its way through my veins, traveling like a disease in my blood, until it violates every nerve in my body. Until I can’t think of anything but this crushing need to run. It’s in my body, in my blood. It reminds me that I can never sit still for too long. That I need to run, need to step back and make some decisions without thinking them through.

I thought for so long that I had this under control. Something has shifted in me, and it came rushing to the surface. I have been fighting with it for weeks. Trying to wrestle it back into its box. But I gave it the tiniest bit of light in the box that I shut it in and now it’s inching through my body again, searching for weaknesses. Whispering in my ear dirty little things that are poisoning the once strong wall around the weakest parts of myself.

I know listening to it, giving into it part by part, is a choice. Though most times it doesn’t feel like that. Most times it feels like something worse will give inside of me if I don’t listen. Something that has never seen the light because it has been locked down so tight it can’t move, can’t whisper. So I listen. Just like I listened before.

Only some things have changed. I can actually run now. I have that ability. I don’t rely on others, don’t have any ties to things that actually depend on my existence.

I can run. So I shall.