The DNA of Running

Writing prompt this week was to respond to this picture.

I can’t run. But that’s no big deal since I can’t walk either. Nor can I sit up totally on my own or wipe my own ass. I’ve never been able to do those things though, so I’m not completely sure I miss them. I mean, wiping your own poo seems like it can have its disadvantages. Of course, lots of people, including my parents, talk to me a lot about privacy and trying to respect mine since I don’t get a lot of alone time, yadda yadda. But as with the toilet routine, I’ve never really had privacy the way they think of it, so I don’t know how to miss it. I feel that way about a lot things that other people think I should be sad about. All the things I can't do. But I don't think about it as much as it seems like everyone else does. Except for running that is. My wheelchair is mechanical and it can get fairly speedy when no one is looking; the wind blows my hair a bit and I feel the tingle of speed and its dangerousness. So I feel like I can say that while I have never run, I miss it. My body misses it.

I dream about running a lot. Well, maybe not as much as I dream about flying, but I think my running dreams are the ones that are simultaneously the best and worst of my dreams. The running dreams feel real. As though somewhere in my DNA is the program code for running and my brain can take it and play it through my mind and across my body so that during the dreams I feel totally whole. I am wind. My muscles and veins have life. And then I wake up. I can never get back to the same feeling if I try to go back to sleep right away. On those nights I don’t usually go back to sleep at all. It is too depressing. So, I read.

If there’s an invention that I think has made life hugely better for disabled people in last hundred years, it’s the ebook. I don’t have to ask anyone to read or try to finagle a heavy book into a spot where I can both see it and turn the pages. Harder than you think when you’re farsighted and can’t lean forward or turn over. If I’m lucky, my older sister will help me to bed and she’ll let me keep my earbuds and ipad close. My parents think it is a distraction from rest. I guess I get to be a normal teen at least in a few ways.

After my running dreams, I like to read either science fiction or westerns. Frankly, I think they are mostly the same. I mean there’s always bad guys and mission to do or a wrong to right and shooting things with either lasers or bullets. My favorite western is this stupid historical one that is kind of a romance novel I think. I found it for free in the stuff posted by authors on the ebook sight. I don’t care so much about the love story and I really don’t care about this chick’s petticoats and their various levels of tightening. But the writer knows how to write about horses so well that I don’t care about the rest. The author, it says it's by Terrance Walter but seriously that is not a name, must be from horse farm or something. He has this amazing scene where horses from the chick’s family farm get loose and end up running through the streets of Chicago, but like western Chicago, so all old timey.

“Each horse in its turn, no more than half a footstep from the next, rumbled and thundered down the clapboard road at a speed that said anyone caught in their path risked the pain of death. Their brown coats heaved and swelled as their breathes reached peak to bring their trampling hooves down upon the earth like rail splitting hammers. Their legs pulsing as their hearts strained to keep the pace of freedom.”

Gets me every time. Reading it is almost like being in the dream. Almost like running. My breaths always get a bit fast and I have to close my eyes to calm down before I set off any alarms on my monitoring machines  in the night. That Terrance, he knows what it is to miss running.