Those Patagonia mornings, I would trail my fingertips across the tent floor, feeling the grass and rock below the plastic green, before squeezing my eyes shut again to flip away from awake in search of a place where I might move and know, even just for a few hours, where I was headed.
***
These are the spaces my mind wanders when my body stops—postcards from places where I never arrived, nostalgia for days I never had. My mind flutters like a red knot with clipped wings, sweeping grey feathers against barbed wire. But then the door opens; the pictures dissolve; I press the balls of my feet, over and over, into earth. My tailbone loosens; my hips uncoil. Soon I forget about the barbed wire, the absence of wings, the moments that may or may not have happened. I see leaves and hills, maybe snow. My mind empties and my bones remember what the rest of me forgets: they know, without sentences, that movement will take me where I need to go.
***
I still think about those Patagonia mornings, hardly waking for two months, wondering each dawn where I was. Things are clearer now. My bones, to the best of my understanding, have melted back to creamy white and whole. I sleep inside, my tent packed into a cylindrical bundle in a dark corner of my closet. If I’m lucky, I might find myself blurring through the woods in the dark. Last night I arrived, with a distant notion of surprise, atop East Rock, watching milky light mix with the orange speckled city. I could see the ocean.
When I run, I remember where I am. I live without thoughts on my way to wherever my feet pull me. In New Haven, this often means some perch near Mill River, like the bridge above it, where I watch pleats of water move in the breeze, or a slab of rock on the banks of it, where, in the late afternoon, the sun can paint the insides of your eyelids red. Other nights they take me above Yale’s farm to the hill with the swing, where I roll on the grass before lingering on the ground, my limbs sprawled, peeling wet maple leaves from my skin. Some afternoons, when the sun has already dipped below West Rock, my feet take me to the arched tree above one of the lake trails in East Rock. I climb to the upper arch of the tree’s parabola shape and lean into a well of branches. I can hear the ducks.
***
I could see the ocean last night, perhaps barely. Fog blurred the water into a feathery mass of purple and grey, not unlike the sky. My bones knew what kind of day it was before the rest of me did: a day for the swing, the river trail, the sun salutations. I found myself by the lake at one point, looking at the only tree with leaves hanging from its branches. The thin slivers of ebony shook amid a forest of bare limbs and rain-soaked earth.
The geography of my movement has drifted over the years, but my feet often find water. I crossed a four-lane highway one autumn night around midnight, walking past the whir of speed and blur of headlights. After running to the shore, a group of us tugged off our clothes and jumped off the dock. The reflection of factory lights jiggled and splattered onto the black water. A swan perched atop the sloshing waves. The cold stung. I heard gurgling underwater sounds. I saw the backs of my eyelids and felt my hair hang weightless above me like spilled ink. Coming up for breath, I gazed over the surface of the water, punctuated with circles of wet hair. I spun onto my back, squeezed my eyes shut, and trilled toward the sky. I laughed, dipped my jaw into the water, spit it up, and paddled back to the barnacle-coated posts of the dock.
Another time I moved towards water without knowing it: Resurrection Trail. It was 40 miles and I insisted on running it alone. I had not run in a month. I remember little from those 14 hours, besides the times when the emptiness of meditation filled up again: taking three pictures of fireweed, getting lost where the trail split, hearing the birds I couldn’t see squeal with what sounded like pain. I dipped into the glacial river later that night. I remember that part, too: the grey, silty water hitting my hips as my skin clenched. My then-boyfriend was setting up the tent in the dark. He told me that the cold water would dissolve the pain in my thighs. At the time, my shoulders were bleeding and I couldn’t stand without hunching. The water tingled until I went numb. I don’t remember which parts of me hurt, but I remember wanting to keep moving. My bones missed the illusion of a finish line.
***
In first grade, my teacher asked how we knew that the world rotated. I raised my hand and answered that if you twirled around really, really fast, then fell onto the ground, you could watch the sky spin.
Years later, I still see more when I think less, like the unlikely dance of sky when motion cracks its stillness, though I had to look up the fact that the earth rotates once every 24 hours. It’s the kind of knowledge I forgot I had, though it was probably there all along: how else would night rise and fall in waves only as high or low as the short space of one day, never splashing extra darkness past the 24th hour?
When I run, I often fall. I collapse onto pavement, snow, grass, leaves, trees. From below, stars become dizzying streaks, splitting into lines and spreading across sky. I stop to catch my breath and rest my legs. Everywhere I look, motion unlocks something in the copper-colored moon or hazed-in city. The landscape stirs, and I feel like I am returning to a vision of what is really there, behind the usual cloak of stillness.
Scientists seem to agree that this running thing brings us to something: movement explains the origins of our bones. I read an article the other day entitled “How running made us human.” It said that running shaped and rendered us: the tendons in our feet, the ligaments in our toes, the space in our spines. These features are meant for more than walking: they absorb shock and spring us forward. Even our skulls help, cooling us with sweat evaporation and chilly blood winding up our necks through arteries and veins.
It’s no surprise, I suppose. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, asked after he travelled away from his country why he had moved, when his bones lived in Chile. My bones—the inside part of me, what holds up—live in motion.
***
I am not fast or competitive; these days, I rarely count miles or minutes. I move to feel. I find hills to feel fire ants biting my calves and dancing in my thighs. It reminds me about the place I live in, with its ebony leaves and swiveling factory lights, as well as the body I live in, with its rhythmic breath and wobbly feet bones. Running pulls me towards what my mind forgets, but my bones may have known all along.
I have one friend who often asks me what I am running away from. I rarely have a good answer, though I usually correct his syntax (“toward” instead of “away from”). I think about East Rock (closed eyes on a midnight trail, the sound of exhales). I think about Gavan Hill (wide spruce trunks, snow-coated alpine). I think about Baranof Warm Springs (a 30-hour run, red eyes and scratched legs). I think about a flock of red knots, too, flying in a fluttering mass 9,000 miles south each winter. They drift over the continent, from the highest latitudes in the Arctic tundra, to the lowest ones in the Antarctic tip of Patagonia. Red knots pass above New Haven’s shoreline: they glide and flap over Lighthouse Point on their way to days with more sun. Their bones know, without sentences, the magnetic trail of movement pulling them through clear or clouded skies.