Running Girl

 

8 July 2021

As I got to the top of the stairs, I saw Running Girl go by. Running Girl! We’d just been talking about her, how many times around the mile loop she goes, her brief stops to check her splits, the way she withholds eye contact. One guy has a thing about Running Girl, but of course it’s platonic. She’s the perfect runner, running by the clock, counterclockwise around a clock-shaped circle were it cast by Dali. One guy says his wife thinks Running Girl should just stop, and I propose that she’s not happy. Her right leg kicks out as she goes up hill, but only slightly. Not getting anywhere seems a spiritual task, but not getting there always in the same way is perhaps something else. If there were not Running Girl, we’d have to invent her. She’s just what we need on a ordinary evening to remind us of time—not the exact time, but our sense of it circling into history, trying to evade straight lines, but coming back on the hill that makes the circle for a moment square. For 24 hours, he says of his Trump-supporting wife, there was quiet on January 6. An interregnum before Fox told her what to think; for hours she felt confusion, unsupported by words. She hasn’t noticed that he won't respond to her statements, and it’s been years now. Or she has, but fails to tell him that. The cemetery is another loop, where families visit their out-of-time relatives inside the weather, which is time on an etch-a-sketch, aching to be erased. There’s a rat running in my memory maze who stops abruptly at the wall like Dylan Carlson or Richmond Street, being blind. Duck blinds mean the ducks are blind, not you, hiding in your canvas room, aiming your gun at marsh grass and clouds. Love is blindness, sings U2. Love blinds both, or none. It is you I run back to, not meaning to get anywhere except back to the weather.