Sometimes I wonder if it was always this way. This way, with these broken breaths and a fractured heartbeat running faster than me. This way, with the sweat in my eyes and trailing to my lips, the dirt on my legs and caked on my shoes, making my summer sunshine tan another shade of brown. It wasn’t always this way, but right now that’s all it feels like: is this way.
This road feels deserted. I’m not all that sure what road it is, or if it’s even the right road. But it’s technically not completely deserted… I see someone up ahead, so it must be right. Unless they’ve made themselves lost, and me, and every other metaphorical lemming on this road. We’ll just follow each other, and follow each other, until something comes that ends it for that one up front, and then the rest of us. That’s kind of pessimistic, I guess, but also maybe just a little bit true.
I’m rambling now. It happens on days like this. The sunlight must be channeled through a magnifying glass, one that’s held directly over this stretch of road. There’s no other explanation for the heat, the squinty-eyed lighting. It almost seems to burn through the dust clouds kicked up by flats and sneakers and spikes on their way to somewhere cooler…
Somebody comes by from behind, to the side, to the front, and beyond my range of thought. I want to follow, to catch up and stay with somebody, anybody. But I don’t, not today.
Some days, I feel as though I could go and go and go forever. Some days I feel as though I have wings on my shoes, on my feet actually, and I think that I can take off and fly through all this. But that’s only some days. Most days, this day, the others have the wings, and I have rocks in my shoes. Literally, rocks in my shoes. One against my heel in my right shoe, and one that’s worked its way up next to the little toe in my left.
There’s a small tree up ahead. Lonely, stunted. Honestly, I think it might be a shrub. But for right now, what I really see as I look at the tree-shrub is the pool of black shadow just below it. Here is where the good stuff happens. I pass under the tree-shrub, hoping for a reprieve.
I don’t feel respite, though. I feel as though I’m losing my mind. Beyond mindless babbling and random studies into the flora along the road. My calves burn as though a hand is wrapped around each of them, squeezing tighter and tighter and tighter, working its way through to my shins. My right knee pops, my ankle is sore, my arms are lead. My lungs have cotton in them. That must be why there isn’t enough air, no matter how hard I try to breathe in, breath out, and keep them working. My hair is stuck to my neck, slowly, slowly, slowly sliding free of its tie, allowing gravity to pull it against my back. I’m alone.  That’s what bothers me the most. The others with the wings have left me behind. I want to stop. I want to be done. It hurts. Please, God…
Then I’m out of that breath of a second of shade. It’s behind me; , growing further away with every step, every meaningfully meaningless step on this endless sun-covered dirt road. I don’t look back. I can’t look back. I don’t, I can’t remember what I was just thinking. I know I want to stop. But I won’t. Maybe I should. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll carry on to the finish. That’s all there is right now: this way. This way, trying to find my wings; this way, my feet still moving me forward. This way to the finish.