My feet find the ground, the sights of my pistol glow from the nightstand. In one hundred minutes, the miranets across Kabul will set fire to the afternoon wind.
When you wake up early enough, no one can know your whole life.
I drink sixteen ounces of water before my hand reaches for the light switch. To check the weather, I tap my phone. It used to be I would walk to the egress window, move aside the blind and place my palm flat on the glass. This reliance on technology, a phantom crutch.
How far could you make it alive if everything ground to a halt? I think to myself, but in reference to everyone. The royal you. All of us.
Tie your shoes and go for a run. Not a soul can know where you are. All these decisions are yours and yours alone. Start doing this every day and it becomes irreplaceable. It’s meditation, it’s prayer.
Alter your route, never wear earbuds, and always have a weapon with you. You never know who’s watching. The internet will have you convinced you can’t piss at a truck stop without a three-letter agency measuring the water displacement, but after a few turns on foot, with enough familiarity, you've vanished. On the run. Untraceable.
By the way, with the right life experience, you are the weapon.
At this hour, the world is vast and still. Subsumed in near silence. You’re one heartbeat moving across a map, you’re Voyager-1 blipping through interstellar space. Alone after those few deviations. In the days before every porch facade was decorated with a glowing doorbell camera you’d encounter a van creeping block to block, firing off bundled newspapers onto front lawn walkways. Plastic bags stuffed with editorial conjuncture, sports scores, and comics strips. Not anymore. Now you just tap your phone.
In the days when you could still count the stars from civilization, if you meant to show someone a land they’d never seen you’d have to draw a map or paint a picture, and even then they might not believe your travels. This is how it feels to run alone. On mornings like this, you can hear for miles. By the time my legs begin to burn, the cadence of my feet striking the pavement matches my heartbeat and evaporates. Somewhere, indistinguishable from nowhere, I’m running.
You’ve fought to keep breathing, I think to myself. This struggle is worthy of continuance. Running for your life. You are worthy. A mantra, like the rosary.
I wake up and put my feet on the ground. My hand reaches for my rifle, positioned stock up, muzzle down, balancing on its retractable tripod. The slang for which is “gangster grip.” It will take ages for this habit to dissipate in the civilian world. Warped and aging wood beneath the pup tent’s framing argues as I shift my weight from cot to floor. An astral medium dances above me as moonlight beams through bullet holes from firefights past. Never ran from a good firefight. I duck through the door and crane my neck to look at the Heavens. This far removed from industrialized society the human eye can see 4,000 light years into the night sky unaided. I sit on a wall made of sandbags and fish a smoke from the pack in my cargo pocket. Pines, they’re called, the Middle East Marlboro. Just up the mountain, a man wrapped in a keffiyeh follows the cherry of my cigarette through a monocular lens. You never know who’s watching. In one hundred minutes, Californians will kick their feet up and witness a yellow dwarf star sulk beneath the waves as if any of this is not a miracle.
Back home I quit smoking and I start to run.
Distance is imaginary, anguish is a necessary process—a mantra, a prayer. Every morning. The clinical terminology for this is “disassociation.”
Alone, my demons make the torment more manageable. One foot in front of the other. A hundred miles and running. The horizon jostles forward of me like bad camerawork. God won’t kill me while giving this much effort.
I’ve made a deal with the God that lives out there by Voyager. I quit smoking.
In some places the tombstones all have matching days and years on the right side of the hyphen. A truth you cannot run from. An entire generation wiped from the Earth. Poof. Cobblestone avenues where atrocities occurred are now cafe havens. I’m jogging past. The past. This pain is not pain.
If everyone exercised before they encountered the world there would be no war. Division and hate would lift away like souls in the rapture, footprints of lore. The expansion of methodologies would follow suit. Survival of the fittest, the first to stand upright, seeing further within the tall grass, chasing down prey, focused and efficient at high heart rates. Imagine if they’d thought, “That’s all that’s for. No need to kill anything else.” The formation of change, the illumination of adaptation, thoughts before language. The first men lifting stones go on to form a history like the hieroglyphs. Trapeze artists traversing a rock path across a wild river, flawless in their navigation of gravity. Art before the brush, one color running into another. Newton spinning in his grave. In the days when a fever dream consisting of rubber soles, a waffle iron and a Greek deity snowballed into a revolution regarding the utility of paved roads you could disappear. You could run away. Now to get lost you just tap your phone.
A wolf appears in the tract of land across the road, its paws kicking out the topsoil, matching my stride. You never know who's watching. It tilts its skull, appraising, echolocating, my breath plumes in the morning cold. My salt, my sweat glitters towards the asphalt. Within a vanishing point behind me is the glow from one million humans waking. A miracle. Upon assessing its options, the wolf ducks back into the brush beyond the easement. The military nomenclature for this is “breaking contact.”
Might as well, I say aloud to myself, hoping the wolf hears, and increase my pace. I let go—sacrifice, enlightenment.
Wake up. Be above your feet. You’re running out of time.
