Running In The Grassy Wind

June 2nd, 2024

4:32am

Wind brushed my hair like a sweet summer angel’s fall. With combing hands; dancing and twirling my bright blonde and glistening blue eyes. I spun and danced along the grass and sky.

Before I was allergic to seeds, and allergic to trees; before the days of screens and keys. 

Long before healing poetry and long before hurtful words. 

When I ran across elementary school fields like a shiver up a spine, upheaving dirt in the repetitive yet endlessly compounding artform of sprint.

Can you feel that image? Can you twist your strings and compose art like this? Can a movie have your heart pumping like this?

Like being a boy, just you against the world, so long ago and so young.

When a part of your mind was still scared that you may tear through space with a step, or perhaps run straight off the earth.

And looking back…

I could have.

I could have ripped through time, and run along cosmos and celestial light shows. 

For those who have not ran: do you ever feel this?

For those who run to run away: have you ever ran for yourself?

To laugh and giggle as tendons and muscles snap like coiled snakes. My legs coiled and sprung as compressed springs—taut then shot like pistols, endlessly churning and rotating with the strength of an engine.

My eyes sparkled, blue and radiant, with their signature gold ring, dancing among wind. Like a home, placed in the pumping blood and pouring sweat. Like a lover, I kissed the wind and held its hand.

And like a young god, or an old fool, I was the first person to ever hold the wind and pull it with me. Faster than the wind and more precise than an arrow string, I snapped and roped in energy as I slid across dew slouched grass. 

If I were to go back to those fields—now paved over and home to classrooms and parking lots—could the crushed grasses and  weeds call for my hand. Call for the wind and laughter of that boy. Free from obligation and free from reality. 

Could they call for him as I do now? Like an old ship, calling for port? Or as a long-traveled bird, close to its destination. 

Or as the wind calls for those to run through it?

Or as a young adult calls for the boy he once was?

Or as a boy calls for a story to read?

Or as a story calls for a boy to start it?

Or as a boy calls for his story to be written, a story of heroics and magic. With tales of chasing wind and catching it. With tales to be written of glory and beauty.

Someone should have told this boy to think of his time running along elementary school fields.

He would have found himself as heroic as Kaladin and Hercules, and as magical as Dumbledore and Gandolf.

He would have realized he himself had run faster than the wind and caught it. Pity the boy who grows up chasing the wind, forgetting he once caught it.

Pity the boy who grows up only to realize this too late. And pity the boy who grew up never realizing there was never a “too late”.

But even he remembers running along that ever-green grass, always a strange bit wet and squeaky. He remembers running along fences and flowers. He ran across fields of classmates and adventures. Almost as he now ran across fields and columns of memories. 

Pity the boy who calls for his story to be written.

For he forgot he was the one writing it.