If Georgia were not a place, but a representation of inner conflict, then for me at this moment I could kneel before it and humbly ask it to relent, or I could run frantically roughshod all over it with a steamroller of desire bent on flattening it or pressing it under, but watching it, like a sponge only to rise up again in every place I had just been.
There is a thing in Albany, Georgia, a thing called a marathon. It happens in a little over a week, on March 7. There is a number prepared for me, perhaps with my name on it, I don’t know; but the entry having been sent some months ago, by now, I am sure of this much at least: there is a number reserved for me, and it will be laid out on a table among a few thousand others. If it is not retrieved by me, it will be gathered up with those few others whose owners did not show, and cast out or used again next year.
There are kilometres in my legs, many hundreds of them. There are a few races in my legs and injuries that have come and gone; illnesses borne and shucked off, and new shoes and insoles and socks and all the old clothing that have soaked many pounds of water and sweat, and cycled through their countless go-rounds in the tumblers of driers and washing machines.
There is even a little fire in the belly, a smaller one perhaps than the one required to stoke the furnace that drives the engine of sacrifice for the cause of running 26 miles in some distant place on the Eastern seaboard that is both a place on earth as real as the keyboard on which I type, and a monument to the voice that lingers and says “why are you doing this, you are not even ready for it, and the cost is substantial, and the travel is long, and perhaps the ways are deep and the weather sharp”; but these last two things only if the voice that lingers was swept into a melancholy mood that found itself reciting an Eliotesque landscape to convey the perception of a very long journey, a journey made long only by the conflict it bore along the way.
But still there are shoes and socks and shirts and a number that waits for me, and a thousand kilometres and a few races in these legs. But there is not yet a flight on which they will travel, though, and for that, if they will make the journey through Georgia, the monument of my current conflict, to the city of Albany, then perhaps there will be something more for me to write about when I return.
Perhaps that will make all the difference.
Entries (RSS)