Week

An exhausting week finally drags itself to a close, and I’m dragging right along with it. When I set out last Sunday night across four cities, I hadn’t imagined it would wear me down quite like this. Three early mornings of flights, one after another, turned out to be unusually brutal. And underneath all of it, for three days straight, my vitals refused to sit still — heart rate and breathing running higher than I’ve ever known them to, my body simply down, and me left wondering what exactly was happening inside it.

I could feel it most at night, lying there listening to my own heartbeat, too loud, too fast, only to be jolted awake each morning by my notifications of unusual vitals from my watch. The one strange, tangible thing was a pain sitting right at the center of my neck, just below the throat. I don’t have tonsils, so that’s not it, and none of the usual viral symptoms showed up either. It is somewhere inside. The irony is that ever since I started training for the trek, I’ve felt the fittest I’ve been in years, barring two crashes along the way, both of which, fittingly, Claude had already predicted looking at my workout load and sleep routine. This week I had to stop moving altogether, and ninety days of hard-earned consistency now wear a scar for it — that amazing, unbroken streak with one sore, gaping week torn out of the middle. I know it isn’t the end of the world, I know I can build it back, but the chart on my website carries that hole now, possibly forever, and I loathe looking at it. Stupid body. I did everything right this time, better nutrition, better sleep, better hydration, and it still couldn’t keep up. Just fucking disappointing. It’s been a while since anything has irked me this deeply. All week I’ve had to hold myself back from doing something reckless, wary of causing damage I couldn’t undo. Tonight, I’m hoping my heart rate finally settles back into the 60s, so I can close the weekend out with a 15k run, something to make up, even a little, for everything this week took from me.

As if that disappointment weren’t enough, a wave of sadness rolled in and took over, uninvited. I don’t know its source. Maybe the music, maybe my cycle, maybe just withdrawal from the endocannabinoids a week without movement stole from me. I found myself sifting through old letters, caught on this one thought: why is it that once the dust settles, all that’s left behind is a fond memory? How does the mind so conveniently forget the very things it once conjured? Is what remains even the truth, or just a memory of a memory, once removed from whatever actually happened?

Dungeon that is my heart, holds me in a cell,
bound by an old spell that I can’t dispel.
wrapped in darkness, my senses overwhelmed,
this eternal wait for light, when does it end?