You can smell it in the sky—the way the air softens, the way the shadows begin to fold into something less cruel. There’s a kind of silence that settles when a storm decides it’s had enough. A hush that almost feels like forgiveness.
And then—
Dawn.
That fragile thing, always slipping in like it’s not sure it’s allowed to stay. We call it “hope,” don’t we? That strange, irrational warmth that crawls into your chest even when the world is still broken. I used to mock people for holding on to it. Thought I was smarter. Sharper. A realist who had no room for illusions.
But this year…
This year, something inside me cracked.
Hope found the opening and seeped in—not loudly, not like a revelation—but like water through old wood. Quiet, persistent, irreversible. It’s not the kind of hope that waits for miracles. It’s the kind that teaches you how to breathe again, even if your ribs still ache from everything that tried to crush you.
I’ve been in bed for weeks.
Not sleeping. Not really awake. Just floating in that strange in-between where time forgets your name. And in the quiet, guilt whispered. My kids—my world—they’re pulling away, like they sense I’ve drifted too far. I don’t blame them. I barely recognize myself.
And yet, here I am.
Sitting on the porch as the morning spills into color. The horizon bleeding from gray to amber. Even the cows look lighter, like they’ve forgiven the night for being so long. There’s a wind brushing through the fields that cuts deep, not painfully, but clean. It tells me I’m still alive.
I want a cigarette.
God, I miss that old ritual—the inhale, the pause, the illusion of control. But the doctor said no. My lungs are giving up. Funny, right? The body protesting what the mind keeps allowing. I laugh about it. Say I’m balancing the abuse—mind, heart, body. A little wreckage for everyone.
But I know the truth.
I light thoughts instead. Set fire to memory, to longing, to all the things I still can’t outrun. Writing has become my last addiction. My only way out of this self-made hole. The more I write, the more I bleed. And strangely, the less it hurts.
I miss running.
God, I miss it like a lost limb.
She was my faithful mistress—the only thing that made me feel weightless. Now my muscles feel like strangers. I’ve been still too long. My DREAM run was three months away. Not anymore. Life, in its usual cruel rhythm, pulled me out of sync again.
Three strikes.
First, I waited months for registration. The system crashed. Slots gone in 30 minutes. I tried anyway.
Second, everyone I knew made it in. I didn’t. I begged. And somehow, they let me in.
Third… I won’t be here. The run will go on without me.
Isn’t that the story of my life?
Running toward something I can never quite touch. DREAM MARATHON, they called it. I called it a promise. And now, just like that, it dissolves again. A cruel trick of fate. A closed loop of almosts.
Maybe it’s time I wake up.
Maybe it’s time I run—not toward a finish line, but away from the version of me that believed this was the only dream worth chasing.
Or maybe…
I just sit here a little longer. Let the wind wash over me. Let the world move without me for a while.
And maybe I whisper the one thing I’m afraid to say out loud:
Maybe I won’t get another life.
Maybe this is the one shot I get to feel everything—heartbreak, longing, stillness, and the kind of hope that doesn’t need a race to be real.
Maybe I still run.
Even if it’s only in my mind.
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