Finis

I am running from my death and yours, panic-stricken, eyes ahead. My approach to this is half denial and half desperate spiritual exploration in the search of some sort of balm to make it all less frightening. Some theory, some understanding, that will make the inevitable conclusion of life less traumatizing.

I am running from my children growing older and the resulting atmospheric emptiness. On this one, though, I am also running toward that freedom; additional time to write, to travel, to linger in Tim’s company without interruption. But mostly, I am dreading the silence. I am not good at being alone. My default setting seems tilted toward chaos, noise, light, chatter, and the warmth of another’s body.

I am running from the narrowing of my consciousness, from the kind of close-minded decisiveness I sometimes see in others as they age. I still want to embrace the not knowing with an open heart and the curious eyes of a child. I want to travel to foreign countries and look around and be humbled by all the things I do not know. I hope, on most matters, I continue to feel heavily uncertain, burdened by the fact that I will always know less than I desire.

I am running from the closing in of comfort, consistency, and routine. And this one is the trickiest of all because routine with children is my life-blood. Their nap times and bedtimes are small pieces of freedom and so I am a zealot about the schedule of our lives. But when this tricky period is over, I hope that I travel and adventure unimpeded by the risk it poses to routine. 

I am running from physical discomfort and the inevitable changes of aging. I lay in bed this morning, feeling the warmth of the blankets and the soft curvature of the mattress and wondered at the peace in my body. Nothing hurts. The warmth of bed in cold darkness is a delight. The first taste of coffee as the drug jolts my system into overdrive is raw pleasure. Moving from room to room with ease and without consideration for aching joints or injuries is a temporary gift. I am running from the decline of my body, this miraculous tool which has taken me up the sides of mountains and halfway around the world without even the whisper of a complaint.

I am running from my death and yours and the grief I know will undermine the very foundation upon which I am rooted. Everyone I know and everything I know is going to die, and that is a fact which fills me with urgent vitality and desperate sorrow in the same exhale. I do not wish to be here without you and I do not wish to leave before you. I wish to exist, forever, alongside you. And it is this wish, this very impossibility, from which I most desperately flee. 

What a sweet gift to own: departure hurts like it does because I have loved so deeply, eaten so fully, laughed so heartily, and connected irrevocably to the beauty of this place. Oh that it could go on forever with you beside me. It is a marvel to be alive at all and ecstasy to share it with someone so dear. What an inconceivable gift that of the billions who live here, you and I should share the same breath, a pint in a darkened bar in a foreign land, and embrace, together, the uncertainty of the precious and numbered minutes which lie ahead.