5 Miles

Which God accepts prayer while I lie flat on my stomach? It’s all I can muster most regularly, the outside and night time bring out some demons that need to be put to bed at 10 pm. As soon as the midnight hour rolls around, I get an urge to troll the town.

Any day of the week is good enough for me, the same sights, busy streets or desolate sidewalks change as quickly as Saturday to Sunday. I can spend hours, a little drunk as all I need, smoking a cigarette and just watching. It’s hot air, a pack of spicy fuck off I don’t even enjoy lately.

My lungs are killing me, so I am trying to figure out how to take care of them for now, who knows how I may feel shortly. I watch some TV or a movie, and the sights of anyone boozing or having a smoke make me want to join them. Some sick parasocial relationship perpetuating my ill health.

I went on a run yesterday, 5 miles in the hills. A year since I did anything serious, my chest hurt and I coughed up some bad memories. My sides cramped and my muscles ached, but I cried when I reached the top of my mountain that day. Between the hyperventilating and setting sun, part of me thought about how I’d get home. I did my deep breathing, which I spent years working on, and enjoyed the downhill back home.

So nice to have a home.

I stretched and I am still so miserably sore, dying for a cigarette with this chronic cough waking me up, and fruitlessly avoiding the craving for alcohol. A drop will do me, it’s all I need to wake up this menace. “Hey, I had a drink, which is why I am acting crazy all of a sudden…”

I am crazy! I wish I had that confidence normally, but I am so miserable and brooding sober. My character is quieter, but I get stupider when I drink. At least I am brave enough to be a kind of ignorant that I can learn from, there is only so much I can gain from my silence.

But what’s the rush… I want to be able to do it all: everything I want. I was playing bass in my room, and my neighbor started playing their guitar. They sounded amazing, and I almost cried. Either I get that drink and ignore them, focus on myself and just keep practicing, or I give up entirely because I am not talented, I will never be that good, and all the sounds inside me will have to find another way out. I laid on my face and pondered this split in my emotions. Alcohol or impotence, misery of two kinds.

I am truly non-functional at the simplest of inconveniences, I know to practice, to ignore others to a degree, but can’t offer myself that grace without booze. I am not a creative, I am a drunk. I know to take my time and not rush, I am not talented, I am rhythmically challenged. These narratives don’t let me be. I have heard so much from others and internalized it, and I don’t know who I am, or what I can do.

But I can up and run, so I’ll start there. And again, and again.