Nonfiction by Laura Waldrop
I follow a dragonfly for a bit, running down the gravel path. Two days ago, I ran eight miles. It had been a while since I ran that far, and I felt the most okay I’ve felt in . . . a while. I came home filled with—let’s call it—God’s love, but it drained out of me at an impressive rate. Because there waiting for me were all the problems I want to run away from. Mounds of sticky tissue, soiled by a cold I can’t shake, line the garbage bin; my eyeballs are leaking gaskets my handyman husband doesn’t know how to fix; my every orifice oozes. It occurs to me that I last trained for a marathon 13 years ago, during the worst depression of my life. Today I think, maybe, during this season of life, I will, again, only feel okay while my legs are churning.
A copper-bellied robin glides past a deciduous tree, leaves just beginning to rust. A swoosh of pure white cloud is smeared across a periwinkle sky to the east. To the west, storm clouds, steel gray, gather over the tabletop mountains. A breeze brushes the skin of my arm, now wet with sweat, and it feels so sweet, so sweet that I marvel, for a moment, at the brilliance of evolution, how we—homo sapiens—lost the hair covering most of our body so that we could stay cool enough to run long distances. Tall wild grass—smooth brome—sways gently; it’s flexible, bending with the weather instead of toppling over.
I spent the morning, before lacing up my running shoes, reading When Things Fall Apart by the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, because everything is broken. Everything is shattered into pieces that can’t be glued back together. But right now, in the present moment, I am running. I experience groundlessness within every stride, a fraction of a second when my entire body floats in midair. Within every stride, I fall and find there is still earth beneath my feet. I am breathing. I’m sucking in the wind and funneling it into my legs. My heart beats. I can feel it thundering, rapid yet steady, a mighty rhythm propelling me forward. Audra McDonald sings, through my headphones, “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” a song about loneliness and human kindness in turn. I don’t know what is waiting for me at home, but in the nowest part of right now, I feel okay.
Laura Waldrop is a recovering engineer, yoga therapist and neurodivergent writer, with prose published in Hippocampus, MoonPark Review and NeuroKind. In her free time, Laura enjoys moving her body in nature, playing the piano/cello, and—true to her roots—building spreadsheets. You can find her at www.waldroplaura.com.
