apple picking

how did you know?
how could you have possibly seen my lips in such a shade of red, years ahead of our lips departing? the hopeless romantic with blue hair and torn vans wrote everything down. he wrote stories of love and loss and of an endless search for our souls' true partners. he played every chord with purpose and direction, though i didn't see it back then, nor do i think he did either.

i hope your dreams have continued to manifest themselves in truth. i hope you know the extent of such claims and poems; of such beautifully written passages and chords.

[can you write out salvation, sweet love?]

he used to write about an apple tree standing tall and alone. about my shoes that matched the color of the fruit and my lips the color of the juiciest of them all; but I hadn't even started painting my lips yet.
he wrote of bruises and fruit with damaged skin. words of dissatisfaction and disinterest in what was already fallen or within a hand's reach. of the need to find an apple the color of my lips.

well they're indeed red now, sweet boy. and i have climbed in search of that very apple with an almost complete disregard to my fear of heights. i have fallen abruptly but not at all how i imagined. my mouth drips with sweet fruit juice and my hands and chest remain sticky with love and joy. my heart calls out and continuously gets answered and met with love. from here, i'll pick up the writing.

alone

i'm at a bus stop a mile into my run with tears rolling down my face. the humidity makes it especially dramatic and disgusting and the plethora of cars speeding by add a sense of shame, almost; i cannot possibly be the strangest thing they see on their commute today.

i sit with my head down, looking at my running shoes as i type on my phone. there's an older man pacing behind me exhaling his cigarette smoke in just the perfect direction for the wind to blow it my way. my cloudy thoughts find his smoke and marinate themselves in a haze of choking reality. 

how did I get here? 

running was my salvation. the thing that allowed me to want to get up, want to move and conquer. the distance always itching to go longer and longer. yet i sit on this bus stop a mile away from home with no idea why i cannot go further. 

before embarking on this heart rate training, i could count on one hand the amount of times i had ever set out for a solo run. i either had a training group run on the weekends or a weekday practice. the group mentality always made me show up, and the rest just kind of took care of itself.
yet here i am, alone on a cement bench with no desire to keep going another step. every possible dark and twisted thought filling my head and multiplying enough times to give me a headache.

i miss the joy and cleansing from long runs with friends. i miss the mindless morning drives to wherever to run towards a sunrise and away from the norm. yet i am stubbornly tied into seeing this through the end and reaping its results. so until then, i'll sit here alone fighting between my deep desire towards where i want to go, and the smoky maze that's the path to get there.

long runs with these three drain the negativity and fill my heart with love

myself, jim, and angie on one of my absolute favorite days.