Notes
It was still light outside when I left, 4:30 ish, running north and east along the roads. Today is apparently "put weird fish manure" on your lawn day, because the whole of Castle Heights smelled terrible. Made a slight wrong turn and went up and then down a hill I didn't have to but it was okay, and then when I turned west then south then west again it was sunset. The sky was orange first, and then bled into a stripey pink and purple and I ran and ran parallel to it, lost in the headphones and the rhythm of my feet. I thought about how it's been a banner week for me, how I had a great job interview, how a black man won the presidency, how my home state voted for him in a move I'd have said was twenty years off. I wondered if I could go home again, and I can in a superficial way but I know it's been gone since I moved out at seventeen.
I waited out the light at National, stretched my IT band, ran long the freeway for a couple of blocks. From the tallest building at my college, sometimes I would look out at I-95 or 195 in the dark, at all the headlights and tailights and think that they were so beautiful because they meant that, if I wanted to, I could get on the move. I moved here.
I turned south again, and then west in another two blocks, and I'd been away from the sunset and now the whole western sky was blazing orange. I've lived here long enough that I know from wild fires and it looked like the ocean was on fire, like maybe all the sand and the buildings and the water had turned to sawdust and lit up. I finished the last three blocks as fast as I've ever run. Like a moth to the flame, and it hurt but I couldn't stop. The part of my brain that I share with lizards and insects just said, GO, and so I went. And when I got to the end the sky was a dusky gold, nothing was ablaze anymore, and I turned to the south and went home, as you do.