Entirely Human

I am one of the walking wounded who lights his way through this absurd void with a perpetually burning heart.

There’s a point when you run, a point when your body finds its rhythm--your meat is contacting, your tendons are pulling and your bones are obeying. Your breath comes deep and even. All your hot blood is pumping and the whole machine is working marvellously. You feel strong, you feel righteous, you feel animal and unstoppable and utterly alive.
And if you’re anything like me, this is about the time all the bullshit drops away. All the crap we built up over the centuries. All the people who’ve convinced us that they’re our betters and the towers we’ve erected for them to rule us from come crumbling down. The clock stops, the bills fade away, order and religion and anything inorganic or unnatural just don’t exist anymore.
The whole fucking edifice of modern life just topples.
And if you know me, then you can understand how appealing this is.

And so it’s as I reach this point--this sublime, primitive moment--that some things begin to occur to me.
Like to simultaneously curse and praise all the walls that came down when the wires went up. And where that lead me. How good and bad things happen when you can connect with a person you’ve never met.
To love and disdain the human element of the edifice I only moments ago watched fall away. Because for all the time I spend lamenting an urban sky obscured by telephone wires; they brought me to someone that, no matter how it plays out, reached through this blighted webscape, pushed through the digital abyss, and made me feel something totally and completely human.
At precisely the point when I wanted to stop feeling anything.

My sneakers scrape gravel and my lungs fight for every breath. Blood rushes through me, my heart is audible to everyone in a one mile radius--I’m sure of it. The sweat lashes off of me, my calves turn to rubber. My eyes stare straight ahead, watching the road cut a swath between frozen, snowy fields.
I grunt, I groan, I let out a short sharp bellow and force myself forward. My body, my mind, will not get the better of me. There’s no quit in me. I’ve never felt this before. My heart burns for a dozen reasons and still I go. I suck cold air through gritted teeth, I taste wood smoke on the air.
And still I go.

Last night was the end of something for me. A shift, a transition, to something else. There’ll be those of you who know what I mean, there’ll be those of you who don’t care.
There are a million and one reasons for it. And the best one I can come up with is that it was time. Time for two people who still care very deeply about each other to separate themselves while they still care. Time for two people who’ve been through everything to face what’s ahead on their own.
Time for two people to be two people.

My feet throb, sweat pools in the soles of my cheap sneakers. My chest feels like a tire with a slow leak. I grind my teeth and watch the sweat fall from my brow, soaking my sweater. I’m running on emotion now. There’s nothing in the tank. I left it all out on a country road.
I spent it all.
In the snow and mud of my backyard I collapse. I fall to my knees, pressing them into the cold earth. I raise my torso, point my chest at the sky.
Across the backyard my neighbour sees this all. He sees this--this sweat-drenched, gasping man kneeling in the mud in shorts and what he says is, “Looks like someone had a spiritual experience.”
And I say, “No. Nope. Entirely human.”
And I get up and go inside.

And you--yeah, you; you know who you are--you’ve come into my life at a very strange time. I guess we’ve come into each others lives at a very strange time--and if I believed in things like fate and destiny I’d probably be very afraid.
But I do believe in coincidence, and happy accidents. And now, in very happy accidents.
You’ve helped me realise some things about myself. And I hope you’ll stick around while I sort through these things I’m feeling and experiencing.
I hope I can make it worth your while. I imagine I can. I hope I’ve already demonstrated this to some extent.
It doesn’t feel wrong anymore.