Running, I feel neither empty nor too heavy.
I think about when I used to take Irish dance, and about watching the championship dancers at competitions after my section was done. Reels and slips jigs and treble reels. Like having a good kind of fire in your body, like something between singing and yelling.
Now that I am finally able to run again, I could do that too, at some point.
And I think about my first winter at college, when I still hoped to continue taking dance lessons. That January I found a school that I liked and took a class, and the teacher invited me to come back to try a higher level's class, but I never went back, because it was so much work to travel by train and bicycle in the middle of winter to an unfamiliar place after a day full of classes. I just wanted to be cozy and safe, and it was dark so early, by 4:15 or 4:30.
I think now that if I had kept going to those dance classes, I would not have gotten quite so depressed that semester and had such a hard time that year / the rest of my time at that college, really. But I did the best I knew at the time, I believe.
I'm still like that. I prefer to be at home; I prefer to be in familiar places. Doing easy familiar things. Though I get bored easily, I also get anxious easily. So I walk the same routes over and over again. The library, the produce store, the thrift store, the mailbox. I watch a TV show or movie and then a few days later begin again from the beginning, and then again, until it's like white noise, white sugar, the cheap replacement for
real silence. I ponder how long I could live taking the same seasonal data entry job each year. I clean my room.
Here in Australia I am meeting people I've only met once before, when I was twenty and too well prescribed to worry. I am less sparkly than I was then, but I don't mourn that self. I carry myself better now, maybe with less self-confidence but definitely with more steadiness.
I want you to know that I am not a terribly brave person. It's just that it's the mundane things that frighten me.
