I had been feeling off for a while now, out of step with myself in a way I couldn’t quite name. Not sick, not sad exactly, just misaligned, like a picture frame hung a few degrees crooked that nobody else notices but you can’t stop seeing. So this morning I laced up and went running, on the theory that if my head wouldn’t cooperate, maybe my legs would drag it along behind them.
For a long stretch before that, I genuinely didn’t know what would flip the switch back on. There’s a particular flavor of restlessness that comes from being stuck without knowing why, or how to stop being stuck, and it’s quieter than actual sadness but somehow more exhausting. You just sit there simmering at yourself, mildly irritated, like a kettle that won’t decide whether to boil.
But I got out there, past the gravel lots and the strange roadside relics, my job working for Sikorsky’s RAH-66 Comanche helicopter. A whole machine built for a purpose it will never get to serve, just sitting there in the sun. Running does something to my brain that nothing else quite manages, some rearrangement of static into signal, and today it did that again, right on schedule, like it always eventually does.