The Meadow

Searching, meandering for a bit

I had the dream again. I’m back in that small college town, sort of. You know how dreams get sometimes? When you know where you are, but the details are mixed around? That’s how this dream has been, with all of my memories mixing and the dream logic barely holding my reality together. In a sense it’s wonderful, but it’s also frustrating because, in this dream, I’m searching for something, and I can’t find it.

Five years ago, I was running a lot. It was the time when we didn’t know what would happen next, when we bought postage stamps to save the post office and some people posted black squares on instagram to solve racism, and I had to google, “Can I drive my car around the block or will I get covid if I leave my house?” When walking around the neighborhood, I wore a mask. When grocery shopping, I wore a mask. When going to the post office, I wore a mask. It was early enough that surgical or KN-95 masks weren’t available, so we had to wear the really heavy cloth masks that made your face sweat and caused the invention of the word “maskne”. The only time I could breathe was when running.

I romanticize parts of those memories now, but it was frightening. Every day that passed, we didn’t have answers, and we didn’t really know what questions to ask. I left campus and moved my stuff into the entryway of my boyfriend’s rental. I had to finish college somehow, and I figured it’d be easier to do that in Minnesota rather than back home in the southwest. Quieter. Who doesn’t want to do college in a small midwestern town, among the geese and ducks? In April, the neighbors got chickens, and I added “sit next to the chickens for a bit” to my daily routine. The coop was right between our two yards, so I could sit nearby and just watch them clack around. The neighbors also had a black cat, and the husband would take that cat on walks around the neighborhood. I’d sit in the window, watching him walk by with the happiest cat I’d ever seen, prancing alongside him with her little leash. Every day, I’d exclaim, “Oh look, there’s that man and his cat!”

I started running because they closed the gym because people were getting sick and people were dying. I hadn’t ever really run outside, except for in ninth grade PE class, but running was all I could do to keep myself from going crazy. I don’t know how well it worked, but I ran miles and miles and miles.

I started running slowly. Downloaded an app that would help me figure out how far I needed to run each week in order to run more the next week without hurting myself. Soon, my daily route became too short, and as that happened, I extended my path block by block. One morning, I was enjoying my run with the Hannah Montana soundtrack when it started snowing. I was already so far from the house, so I just kept going, watching my legs turn a little red and feeling the snowflakes melt on my face. Exhilarating. This, I thought, is what it means to be alive.

I kept going. Then, I crossed the big street that I’d never crossed before. I saw houses I’d never seen. I ran into a crowd of unfriendly geese who stared me down and then squawked at me until I crossed the road. I found a hill. Near the hill, I found the spot, the spot I keep searching for in my dreams.

When I ask him, my boyfriend says he remembers the place, which is good because it sometimes feels like a place I only imagined. I took him there once, on one of those spring days, past the geese and the huge houses of Midwestern Suburbia. Somewhere along there, if you take a sharp right turn off the sidewalk and onto a tiny trail, you come across the spot. From my memory, you have to run through a forest first, but then it opens to a clearing. At this point on my run, when I got here, I would open my stride and run fast—take in the clear air, the perfect path, the sunlight making the grass alongside the path glitter. This moment, this place, was everything.

It’s been five years now since I last ran in that clearing. I miss those hours of clarity, and it makes sense that my dreams fixate on finding that space again. Since 2020, those uncertainties that fueled my anxiety have turned into new questions, new fears, new devastations. For a long time, I had to stop running because, every time I’d start again, I would injure myself in a new annoying way. (Think: shin splints first, then a broken arm, then a bout of covid.)

And while I wasn’t running, I watched the world burn. The unprecedented fires across the country became precedented, violent regimes murdered people at home and abroad, and the social media algorithms pushed misinformation and, more recently, AI slop. The questions from 2020 branched into full conspiracies, and people keep dying from climate change, state violence, and airborne diseases.

And while I wasn’t running, I became a teacher. I replaced the serenity of a long run through meadows with the boisterousness of teenagers. I quieted some fears through busyness (and uncovered new fears in the process). I didn’t run for quite some time.

This year, however, I found myself standing in front of a group of ninth graders, telling them that I would run a 5k with them. Their enthusiasm about the prospect of running a race with their teachers gave me a weird pang of hope—their giddy faces and elevated energy made me think that I could try again. And I did. I began training, slowly, and became more enthusiastic when I watched the kids working hard preparing for the race, too. In May, we ran the 5k together, and it was my favorite day in a long time.

I’ve been on summer break for a month now, and I’m still running. The process helps. But my heart feels heavy. I am frightened of the current state of the country and the world. Every day, the world feels more unstable, and every day, new distractions come onto the news to draw our attention away from an oligarchy that is intent on taking over every facet of our lives. The days look a lot like the days of 2020: I’m frantically trying to distract myself from my fears (then with jigsaw puzzles, now with Sudoku or crochet). I cannot nap because I’m afraid to wake up to new horrors on the news. I cannot sit still because the panic will take over.

I made a joke, at some point in 2020, that my running was training for the apocalypse. That’s not a joke anymore; that’s definitely part of what’s going on. However, a larger part is the grief. The grief for those who have died because of the selfishness of my fellow humans, grief for ideas and hope that could have helped alleviate some of the pain. When I run, the grief goes somewhere. When I cry, the grief goes somewhere, too.

I still have hope, lots of it. As long as people still believe in a future and believe in caring for one another, I will still have hope that we will get there. Along the way, I wish you all a space where you can grieve—a small park hidden within a city, a mountainside meadow, an apartment balcony garden, a circle of friends—and where you can hope, stop for a moment and feel a soft breeze, a fluttering of possibly, of maybe, of soon.