at the crack of

4:15 am and I am standing in the middle of the street because I have run out of stuff to not do in the house.

I am looking for something I’m not finding. It’s not on the flat screen of social media, or deep inside a cup of coffee in an unlit kitchen. It’s not under the abandoned blankets on my side of the bed or mixed in the watery shadows of a sleeping household.  

In the dark and the cold, centered on the road there is silence like falling snow. 

I can’t feel my toes; too thin of socks. It doesn’t matter, a quarter mile in I wouldn’t feel them anyway no matter what I wore this morning.

What I am trying to find is locked somewhere in my head and I can’t concentrate long enough to grasp it. It rolls high, billowy-gray and promising but i'm not keeping up.

There is only one way to catch that which is over my head- put it under my feet.

This is a horrible habit to start, this skipping out of bed at 4 am to go running….then pretending I didn’t. 

But I suppose there are worse things.  

"… it is the way I laugh in the desert. When the weight and worry of the world has long since blow away. Dried up between the sages and drifted off into the horizon smeared with clouds promising night rain. 

It is the sound of who I used to be, before I built my defenses too high to escape their shadows...   

And it comes out with you because…."