I’m going to Anacortes tonight...

I’m going to Anacortes tonight to a friends house to drink away my sorrows. These last few weeks have not been good. Today, I wouldn’t even have enough time to make it to the gym, my only salvation. Working out has become my "me" time. I am not me without it. So put Barbie band-aids over my blisters and pull on my running shoes, figuring that I’ll just go for a run on the trail behind Fairhaven, just to make me feel better.

Eugene, Oregon is home to a lot of things. Hippies, for instance. The Oregon Country Fair. The Rock n’ Roll Soldiers. It is also the birthplace of Nike. It produced running legend Steve Prefontaine. It has a nickname- Track Town, USA. Everyone runs in Eugene.

I hated running growing up. I was the chubby kid, the slow kid. Perhaps this is why I’m such a fiend for exercise now- I’m making up for almost 19 years of being out of shape. Running hurts my knees, my calves, my feet, my lungs. But I’ve recently picked it up, because everyone else does it, because it’s efficient and because it streamlines my legs like nothing else can. Swimsuit season is coming up, I remind myself as slowly start out.

The first leg of the trail is hard. I slow down, begin to walk a few times. I wait patiently for the ephedra I took, the ephedra that my mother sends me in the mail in little bottles, to give me that extra boost. I sprint, walk, jog, and run my way up the trail. It takes forever. There is no end in sight. I’ve never been here before. I look for a place to take me back, but all of the trails lead forward. I refuse to turn around, because I’ll feel unbalanced. So I take my time. I look around. These woods look just like Oregon’s wood. These ferns grow in my front yard at home. I might as well be there, I think. Why am I here at all? Why am I in school? What have I really learned?

Around this time, the trees were starting to thin out. I was winded, achy, shaky and unhappy. Sigh. I had also rendered myself unreachable, leaving my cell in my room. There’s no roommate chattering, no music playing (I dropped my mp3 player ages ago), no televison blaring from the next room, yet there was also no silence. My thoughts were loud, my pulse was loud, my feet stamping the trail were loud. I had slowed to a walk, now, telling myself I’d run home. It was too steep. I had not a clue as to how long I’d been gone. I toyed with the idea of walking forever. Maybe I’d just never return.

The trail turned into a road, which wound upwards like a spire. At the top, there was a watchtower. I’d heard of the watchtower, but never been there. It always just reminded me of Jimi Hendrix, which reminded me of summer, with reminded me what I’d rather be doing that walking up to the stupid watchtower when it was still technically winter. But here I was. And there it was, looking like it had been put there just for me, just at that moment. This was the climax. So I went up. And up. And up. And then I was at the top. And there were the mountains, there was the bay, stretching out into a misty somewhere, into an ocean that had once been so mysterious. I thought about the first people who had seen this, who had spied Mount Baker in all of it’s majesty, who had found this land, full of possibilities. Who had built a city, which I was just now discovering. It was all so...big. A lot of things had been big for me recently. But this was really big.

And suddenly, like I had been reading a book, it became a metaphor. Something in my life had just become a fucking metaphor. This was life, as looked at through the lense of literature. I could see this awful, tragic, not-quite-run to the top as something bigger. It reminded me of my education, to sound broad. Even now, as I write it, it sounds much less magical than at the time when this running monologue was going through my mind. So bear with me.

Here’s how it came to work out- I had worked hard to get where I was, but not as hard as I could have. I’d wanted to turn back, but I hadn’t. I’d just slowed to a feasible pace. And it had brought me here, to this view, to this discovery of things I’d seen before, but not like this. I’d been bouncing the idea around of dropping out before I got my degree, of getting on a bus and riding to Mexico and never looking back, or of simply moving to a new town, to meet all new people and see new things. Yet here I was, in the place I’d been living for 6 months, seeing something new. So maybe I didn’t have all the answers, and there was something else for me to learn in class, before I went on to learn the lessons that life had to teach me. Maybe I should let myself be coddled in college a bit longer.

I sighed deeply. I still had plans, promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. Funny how Robert Frost always comes up when I’m thinking metaphorically. I skipped down the steps of the watchtower and started my descent. I had to slow myself several times, because in this downhill, I was desperate to reach the end. It’s the journey, I thought. Not the destination. This time, it really is the journey.

Signs passed that I had seen on the way up. The trip had seemed so insurmountable the first time I’d seen them. Like there was no end. But now, I’d been there and back. A group of runners bobbed by. I silently wished them good luck on the ascent, and for the first time, felt like maybe I could be one of them for once. So confident in their bodies, in their will power that they could run up this mountain. But here I was, running down, non-stop. I’d forgotten my legs- they were simply carrying me home now, unattached and painless. I’d forgotten about my ashy lungs- they were simply feeding my body now. There was no wheezing cough, no sharp pain. I’d experienced what my friends who’d been running for years had told me about- the endorphins that kick in when you’ve been going so long, that you’ve lost track of the fact that you’re still going.

This story was being narrated the entire time. I was stringing my ideas together, like lacing my shoes. They were jumbled as I ran, but they are becoming marginally more focused now. As I sit here, I’ve just returned. I’m shaking, can barely type. But these thoughts were huge. They just happened, and they had to be documented. So I’m putting off my other plans to do this right now. To contemplate over this because, to be honest, this is the high I’d been trying to get with all the shit I smoke and swallow and sleep through.

I’m still going to drink rum until I can’t think. I’m still going to smoke a pack a week of Lucky Strikes, and think that I’m better than all those other people at the gym who don’t smoke. But I’m not going to drop out, I don’t think. There might be something left to see. But I’m not promising anything.