To The Young Girl Doing Back Flips in Her Front Yard on A Warm October Afternoon

We all get a little blue, right? A little sad some days?

 

We all have those nights when we can’t sleep, toss and turn. Get up and take a benadryl. A melatonin. Another benadryl. A glass of wine. Finally, at 3 am, some chamomile tea because we have to be up in two hours.

We’ve all been there.

We have all felt those days when, although you know your life has meaning and purpose, you don’t really feel it walking into your office, the red voicemail light already lit up and it’s Monday, which means someone called late Friday or even over the weekend, which means they were desperate and someone thought this was the right number to call. We’ve all watched the patina of the morning fade.

We’ve all taken a mental health day.

Or rather, more accurately, the day has taken us.

But we’re adults now. We get our work done and we try to find something to keep us moving. We all have our things we insist we do: make the bed, clean the kitchen counter, walk the dog, pay the bills. Something that shows we are still in the world, working. Something so that if someone were to call you at just that moment and ask what you were doing, you’d have an answer, “Oh, just getting caught up on the bills.” Like it’s any other day.

I run. I ran when Rainer died. Even our first winter in Madison, Keith and I would run when he got home from work. The dark already deep. February. Around the edge of a lake. The wind, blocked by nothing, full force off the ice. When we got home, we would have icicles on our lashes and eyebrows.

We made it, we thought. We made it through the day. And we’d order take out and watch television. Because that’s what grief is.

So I have always run. And today, though I want to stay on the couch and sleep and forget, I put on my running shoes.

Three miles in, I turn the corner and you are there with a friend, playing in the front yard, two huge piles of leaves between you. You jump and then suddenly turn a back flip, another and another--you do five altogether!--and when you land the last one, you look at your friend. Her arms are waving. “Yes!” she says, “Five!” You did not imagine it.

Who knows where it comes from, the impulse to turn five backflips in October. The grief I can still feel as whole and clear as the first day. The push our bodies insist on. Head over heels over head over heels.