Running

I joined a running club yesterday. I've been running for years - but always so slowly I couldn't ever consider myself a runner. When I was living in Naples I would go on long meandering runs with Grady or Shelly - along the waterfront or out to Baia and around Lago D'Averno. During the winters in DC I would take a long run on a Saturday or Sunday - along the Potomac on the Mt. Vernon trail - ten miles or so to a restaurant I liked and then, sweaty and tired, take the train back home. There was one marathon once - the Las Vegas Marathon. I was impossibly slow then, as well.

But slow or not, I want to be where there are people, to make friends, and run with a community. Also, maybe there's the tiniest hope that I'll become faster if I'm training with other people.

The club is three miles away from my apartment and the route will become familiar in the next few days and weeks and months.

A trainer named Tom introduced himself and he quickly folded me into his group: two men and a woman who were all recovering from various injuries. My ankle still isn't fabulous yet so this is a good group for me. We went a total of three or four miles together: intervals and drills and strength training. My cardio is working okay - the daily commute on the bicycle ensures this. Afterwards we showered, and ate sandwiches and drank coffee together. It was nice. So normal. I have this great hope of leaving pain in my past - in building a normal life with the calm that other people sometimes seem to have.

Today, the sun shone and I ran errands: grocery shopping and clothes I need for work. It's too early for bed yet but I think I may go to bed anyway. I need to recover. With the long bike rides and running, I'm very tired.

I felt throughout the day that I should reach out to Edward. I'd like to. I long to have a normal conversation - to see his face and hear what he has to say. But I didn't. Why not?

I'm afraid he'll say no. I'm afraid he'll say yes and I won't know what to say when I see him. I'm afraid he'll tell me the truth and the truth will be unbearable - that it will make me go dark again. Worst of all, I have a crisis of confidence in myself. I'm too ugly. Too changed. The years, worry, and medical procedures have made me heavy and the pain has burrowed into my face: networks of intensity and sorrow. The irrational part of me insists that only beautiful people are deserving of love and I've lost my beauty.  If I was still beautiful I could have confidence in the encounter. But I don't want to be pitied and I don't want to pity myself. What if Edward tells him how ugly I've become? So, god help me, I stay away.

riding and meditation

I take the train and then ride my bicycle into work. The ride is nearly six miles and takes me half an hour. The wind is often very strong across the fields and there is some effort. I pant and push and try to draft off of teenagers who make it seem effortless. Oh well. It's my first week of this and my body will become stronger. It is only Thursday and my GPS tells me I've ridden 42.6 miles since Monday.

The spring is shouting to make itself heard above the cold. Sometimes the frost covers the ground and kisses the faces of the yellow daffodils who wilt and withdraw for a time. The next day, when sunlight shines brightly cold though a bracing blue sky, the crocuses and hyacinths open up their mouths and kiss the air. There are birds everywhere. In the trees, with cheerful piccolo sounds, or on the water: ducks and swans and white-beaked blackbirds.

Sometimes I listen to audiobooks while I ride. While Dad was here, I listened to Claire North novellas. While I moved into my apartment, I listened to Neil Gaiman's Graveyard book. Then, sad to finish up the new territory and unable to settle on anything else, I returned to John Le Carre. The Constant Gardner, contrasting the hot sun of Nairobi to the biting wind that burned my fingers as I rode. Today I started Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy again and greeted George Smiley as an old friend.

What I do is tiring: the bicycling, the moving, the changing of my life, my circumstance, my friends; changing fields; learning material I never thought I'd need to know. I'm often so fatigued that my eyelids droop. And I'm often so ravenously hungry I descend on food like a starving seagull. When I'm not at work I'm alone. Too far removed from my intimate circle for their company, and too distrustful to reach out to anyone I know who could support me here. But there is a city full of people and I will begin to collect them.

Meditation is a good way to keep the panic at bay but sometimes I feel it anyway. The fear that I will loose this too. This is the danger of loss: you understand your own fragility. You know your own mortality and it becomes dangerous to have things you care about because loss will sidle up beside you and whisper in your ear, "don't be too attached. I can take this, too."