Welcome Back to Summer

Run;
Steady movement of hips to thighs to heels to toe.
I will miss the steady rhythm of hamstrings when I'm old.

My friend gave up his smoking during spring in preparation for summer running. Wise man. I too enjoy my breath this evening. The air is heady with august, my body works to filter through the woodsmoke, timothy hay, queen anne's lace, and blackberries turning dark in the road-side ditch. A combine rumbles to life and a bi-plane hangs low over head. What a strange Eden this is; where everything is always green yet I walk through most of it only ever touching a carpet of black tar. I have to remind myself to leave the road. Little girls grow up laughing and the only convenience store on the corner sells gasoline and porn magazines. 

I would like to say I am not an emotional person. Not because I want it to be that way, just that I expect it is true. But this doesn't keep me from being anxious, reminiscent, sentimental. Would it be strange to say that I am led to my emotions fastest through every sense that is not the sense of sight? The nose knows memories and loss. The ears are capable of great desire. But I am afraid of these eyes that are cold and calculating, taught with great care to rationally account for everything being taken in. 


I am still running and there is a man on the side of the road. I can feel him looking at me and I keep running still, because one thing you learn in Europe and South Africa is to not make eye-contact with a single man. In the end I look at him anyways, because I cannot truly forget my small-town-girl sensibilities. He is telling me something. I take out my headphones and listen harder. "Walk over here," 
"What?" I say - 
"Just walk here, please." I run a little faster because I think he is asking me to come over by him, where he is standing just off the road in the timothy hay. But then from the underside of the hay explodes a pit bull. Barking and growling, it charges me and I freeze. It snaps at my left leg and I back up, so it begins to circle me and bite at the air. My heart races and finally the owner coaxes the animal back to the side of the road. "I was asking you to walk slowly," The owner explains, like it is my fault, "She is just a year old and will attack any bikers and runners." Well good to know, and isn't this road public? Yet I walk away slowly and only pick up my original pace when I can't see him or the animal anymore. 


When I saw the pit-bull rushing me, I was afraid. I saw it's glinting eyes and open teeth and felt fear. I laugh a little now because I realize that my eyes are not incapable of emotion, like I first believed. 


My eyes are where I feel my fear. 


I am also laughing because the pit-bull scene has kind of sprung me from my earlier dreamy trance and I feel that my thought pattern was possibly a little too melodramatic. 


But I cannot shake the idea of a connection between my sight and my fears. In that connection I make a little hole and climb back through my memories to South Africa. It is no longer summer but winter and my eyes are overwhelmed with the work of rationally accounting for shack after shack crowded for miles along the busy highway. Too much Too much I think and I feel fear. Then I am walking at night in Cape Town and a black man approaches. I feel fear and then I am overwhelmed as he passes me, I am overwhelmed by shame and confusion and the unreliability of these things that we call eyes, yeux, ojos, so that we may better understand the reality of the world.