By Jordan Charlton
In the shadow hanging over the edge of my apartment, the driveway becomes a resting place. The air is humid enough to moisten the insides of my lungs as I inhale. Like I could choke breathing in the day. Yesterday, over the phone, I’d told my best friend, “These might just be the saddest days of my life right now. I choose a direction and just go.” Today, I plan to travel far enough to forget what’s familiar. Here, in this time of being distant, there are too many hours in the day to lose myself to. Today, as with other days, I choose to walk, or, run until I end up sprawled in some freshly mowed lawn that pricks at every piece of my skin.
Resting on my behind, I stretch my legs wide and reach for my toes. The tightness in my thighs wrenches like a wrung-out rag. I regret not stretching. There’s some regret that exists only in feeling. My body is full of tension. My running shoes have seen better days. If it weren’t for the sentimentality attached to these blue and black kicks, these Nikes would have had a final resting place in a trash bin somewhere between here and Oklahoma, the place they were bought for. I can’t believe that even now, after the grip on the bottom of the shoes has grown bald as they have, that they would still be my most beloved pair, let alone my go-to walking shoes of choice?
I push my foot in and feel again how the soles are splotchy. The cushions on the insides are worn. It might be my own sense of sentimentality keeping these things around. I’ve held on to them like the beads of sweat now hold to the temples of my head, any moment they could be gone. Isn’t it refreshing? Ironic? This way I keep retreating into myself for ways to deliver me from this moment. It’s all too much to think about. Most things seem to be. Today, I’ll take my old blue Nikes and run. I don’t know where, yet. It will all be new to me.
Jordan Charlton is a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska. He works with the Nebraska Writers Collective, working with both high school youth poets and incarcerated writers through the programs Louder Than a Bomb: Great Plains and Writers’ Block.