One foot in front of the other. Again and again. Fast. Running toward nothing, really, but the horizon in front of you, the vast stretch of blue, the trees reaching up and up, the white clouds, the silence.

Sometimes it's perfect, this running. Your muscles feel fantastic and your breathing is effortless and you have so much energy you can't believe it, and you are bounding toward that horizon, eyes fixed on it, and basking in it. Your mind is a perfect blank, a quiet space full of peace. That horizon is not so far away. You will get there.

And some days it isn't at all perfect, and nothing is working right. Your muscles are tired, your bones are tired and your feet are sore and you can't get your breath to work right and you are just distracted. Thinking of work and kids and the million things you should be doing right then, but here you are. Running. And on days like this you can't even look at the horizon, except maybe in stolen glances as you run. Mostly you train your eyes ahead of you, at some imaginary point in the sidewalk, and you go. You just keep moving. You can't even contemplate that horizon. But you will still get there.

Today was the latter. My feet hurt and my legs were tired and I was thinking about all the work I'd left undone before I stepped out for the run. But I kept running. This is for me, I told myself over and over. This is for me.

She counts up until the 12th stone and then pauses, because this is where the cold snakes through the brown grass, there in the beating summer sun. It's the briefest of shivers, a sudden shudder, and it passes. The hair prickles at her neck and stays until the 16th stone, where she gets the feeling that the world has gone hazy, and this is brief, too, and she keeps going -- even though now everything is in sharp focus and too quiet, and there is the steady, ominous buzz of cicadas sounding from all around.

The 29th stone brings her to the front steps of the old building, and she is staring at the big yellow NO TRESPASSING sign, and the spray-painted red X on the door, and the jagged jaws of the building's stairs hanging open, ready to swallow a foot, an ankle, her whole self if she's not careful.

A normal person would not go inside, she thinks, before she climbs the stairs with ease born only from lots of practice, dodges the weaker parts of the porch, then plunges inside the feral building, daring it to eat her up.

Mostly freewrite

It's a cool evening. It's been raining for the last three days, and the skies are a heavy gray, and the clouds are dipping low enough you could almost touch them. Everything is wet and mud, and there is a crisp, clean feeling in the air that stirs up all this melancholy in me, unbidden, an effect that brings me right back to 13-years-old, sitting on my bed with the windows open, the rusty-wet smell of the window screen filling the room, the soft quiet of the tucked-in neighborhood, porchlights glowing, TVs flickering in windows.

At that age, I was shy and quiet, and I filled up all my time with notebooks and a much-loved copy of a Sara Teasdale book I checked and re-checked from the library on a regular basis. This is when I started to really explore words, to understand their power, and to feel how comforting they could be.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And I am feeling sad, now, I think because there was this sweet little marriage of possibility and discovery happening then, the stuff where dreams can grow if you let them, and I never gave those dreams a name, never any words, but I kept writing, and I kept writing, and I kept writing, and then one day I all but stopped. It was magic one day and then it wasn't. And I had no words.

And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Tonight Violet wanted to be a frog. "Ribbet ribbet," she said, that crazy-joy blooming in her smile, and she crouched down to jump but she can't figure out the mechanics yet, and so she crawled. I reached down to grab her and toss her up into the air. "Jump frog," I said and she squealed with joy, but when I sat her down she scurried down the hall, away from me, ribbeting all the way. A frog on her own terms.

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

How tiring to wrestle with yourself all the time, to feel so discontent because you feel you aren't doing enough, you aren't being enough, because you feel stuck. To feel sad that you didn't name your dreams when you were a 13-year-old girl. How exhausting. When will I learn that there is value in sitting still, to recognize that sometimes "stuck" is really a sign that you need to be still, if only for a minute. There is value in reflection, and you must lock yourself in a moment to reflect. You must be content where you are sitting.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

There is comfort here. To recognize that this little life is so much smaller than I know. And bigger, too. I can fill myself up with the world, let myself fill it, it will not matter. Except what I make of it.