Thunder.

It’s Wednesday. In Boston, thunderstorms seem to know when you need them most. Outside my apartment there is rain hitting the pavement – it sounds like a whole ocean trying to wash things away. I’m convinced the sky is trying to rip itself in half. I think of how similar we are, me & the sky. I don’t know these days which one holds more water, but I don’t think it matters.

This isn’t cold rain. It’s warm Boston thunderstorm. The air tasted like moss this morning. It weighed down on all of us as if it was a second gravity. Lighting is the spine of the sky, when it breaks we watch from our desks like infants. I am always surprised when the things I find fixed in life start breaking.

There is something beautiful about wreckage: the rain, a clouded horizon line, and pools of water on people’s skin. We might all be made under the same sky – making & remaking ourselves amongst the wreckage.

All is quiet underwater. The rain has slowed the city down for now, but when it starts back up it will be different.

Every time I start back up I am a little different.

Sunday.

Sunday.

My alarm goes off. Its mechanic mouth more jarring here, in the forest, than in the city. I can feel my running shoes rattling downstairs so I set tea to the stove and busy myself with getting ready. 16 miles – my last long run before my ultramarathon next weekend. The run was as conventional as long runs go. Sweat, water, trees, a wrong turn here & there, and the sound of feet scraping gravel. It’s both who you are when you start the run and who you are at the end that matters.

This wasn’t a trip for the forest or for the romantic feeling one gets from being in nature. I spent most the day slumped on the couch finishing my book, laughing with Quincy’s parents, or hearing about how there is a loaf of austin-bread, or vegan bread, on the counter waiting for me to munch on. This summer there has been more days of heat than sun. I know that lately, I spend all too much time reminding myself not to worry about what will be instead of just being.

I’m in the family room. Maverick, the dog, is stretched out on the hardwood floor near the entryway. Quincy’s parents are getting ready to go out for dinner and I am waiting for the thunderstorm. I can feel it in my bones so I am wrapped up in a sweatshirt. I’m not sure if families that aren’t your own know of the little ways they make you feel at home. I’m not sure if I understand it either.

There is so much heart in this home. For a second, I am a part of it all – the eating, the laughing, the talking, the planning – and I am grateful. My shoes are drying out in the corner, tired and wet from a hard morning on the road. Quincy’s parents have left, he is upstairs planning his next move and I am here, just being.

This weekend I have more gratitude for the quiet, for the slowing down of it all, for the austin-bread that is so much more than a simple loaf of yeast & flour. For a moment, I know what gratitude feels like. I want to keep it with me like a slow Sunday afternoon bundled up in the forest.

Water.

Im folding laundry in my tiny studio apartment – we call it the closet. Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong are wrapping themselves in every piece of clothing. I hope that tomorrow when I wake up I will feel the jazz stitched inside my t-shirts. Quincy is in the kitchen stripping kale. It’s midweek and I can already feel the stress of the workplace creeping into my neck. The smell of hot oil and water is stuck to the horizon cooking it’s way down with the sun.

We know we are in transition so we cling to the nights when this closet feels like home. The nights when we can trick the kitchen into feeling like a gourmet restaurant and the lighting above my bed into an ambience that is made for lovers. I picked up Travels with Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck, from the library the other day. It’s summer and I figured that an adventure book would cure my restlessness. One of the opening lines: I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found. 

I have been spending time up in Maine at the beach this summer. I spend hours watching the water and trying to figure out why it will never feel like the Pacific. I meet with John later that evening – read his tales of the Northeast and wonder if he ever spent time staring at the ocean. I imagine myself as his dog, Charley, his truck, his hands moving to meet strangers across America, and I think of how comfortable being lost they feel. If I am comfortable being lost.

 

I close my drawer and help Quincy with the last bits of dinner. If this is what being lost feels like – I think –

there is no sense in ever being found.