Into the Wild

This was going to be a race report from the trail run I did two weeks ago.  Instead, it's going to be about the movie from which the race's name was taken.

Sort of.

A semi-well-planned night last night turned into another marathon - no pun intended - night-into-morning epic.  This time, it was dinner, a Deaf event, midnight pancakes, and a movie that started past 1 in the morning and went for another two and a half hours.  Most of which I spent relatively alone, as the other two were asleep.

I've always envied Christopher McCandless' courage.  He did what every young, suburban male wants to do: threw away his money, his possessions, his life as he knew it, and searched for truth.  A friend who I consider a brother once recited to me the following quote: "All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."

While one of my partners in crime drove home last night, I kept her awake with a story that was only thinly veiled so as to suggest that there was some minuscule possibility that it wasn't my own.

I wrote of a young man named Everett Reilly who found himself in a life that was, in a word, comfortable; however, six months of sleepless nights finally pulled Everett from complacency and made him realize that comfort was the last thing he wanted.  Everett soon found himself halfway across the world, writing feverishly as if a linear progression of words would somehow untangle the situation in which he found himself.  He realized he was writing his sins.  When his pen ran dry, he placed the pages aside, threw away his name, and declared to himself that his life would begin anew.

The young man - no longer Everett, but nameless - found himself wanting nothing more than to love for the sake of loving, for the sake of learning to love without condition.  He found a young woman who would never return his love, but would allow herself to be doted upon, held, and watched.  He discovered the question that would drive his new life, the question that must always have an immediate and obvious answer: what are we doing here that has to do with love?

Then, as suddenly as everything happened in this new place and life, he met a woman for whom the last had been preparing him.  He called her Evve.

Evve kissed him in a way he had never been kissed before.  When they breathed together, they understood what it must have felt like to be the first person to ever gasp the word Hallelujah.

The young man learned, however, as every protagonist must, that sometimes dreams last days, weeks, or even years, but that does not mean they are not dreams.  Reality eventually forces itself into the dreamscape and shows the young man a devastating truth: for some, there are things much more important than love.

When the young man finally returned from his sojourns, he found that the mountains near his home were draped in snow.  A strange, silent call grew within him, and he began to run, as hard as he could, towards the top of the highest peak.

When I got to the snow, I fell to my knees and pressed my face against it, tried to breathe it in with hopes that the air would turn to ice in my lungs and tear my breath from me in a way I hadn't known in far too long.  In a way that would remind me of that word, Hallelujah.  Of being so overwhelmed with just being alive that tears would come uncontrollably with laughter and every goddamn second would carry with it the weight of an entire lifetime.

Of the only acceptable answer to that question that drives every moment of my life: what are we doing here that has to do with love?

The answer: everything.

From time to time, people as me why I run so much.  Whether or not I like it.  Whether or not I think it's affecting my life... for better or worse.  This is the truth that I can never articulate.