There is a bull flanking my right shoulder blade. I’ve leveled my plane, having reached the crest of West Bay Drive, now having made the conscious decision to literally and energetically elevate myself to this higher place. His left horn is squared to my right shoulder.  At first his glistening horn, wet from the drizzle, maneuvers its way through my fibrous muscle tissue. He enters off of my central nervous system almost intentionally as if only to make his presence known but not to cause any real damage. But he’s stronger than I am and runs faster which drives his horn down deeper, pinning me still against myself. What was once a white scream of a pinch that feels at first good becomes a swelling unending ache of a growl as my muscles make room and adapt to this foreign, two hundred and seventh bone in my body, one more than my biology was made to handle.

By now my lungs are pink taffy bound in the puller. Running with asthma is always a tight. Running with asthma is always a test.       There’s a lot of thinking I can do to arrive at the same “no” but I know now it’s worth it to follow just one “yes”. By the ninth step my mind re-learns what a rhythm is but my body never forgot. My appreciation delivers a trust in myself, knowing and remembering that my body will continue to carry me miles. I’m proud because I never thought my body would ever be something I could trust.

The airways constrict, more sticky in the puller, in my chest. I reach a point in a feeling of resentment that this is something that has been imposing on me the entire time. Its reality is in me lying motionless, caught in the act of deflation through a pinhole. Asthma is a trickster I don’t want to see. As I move more air and the road moves more me, my taffy pulls a fast one to become brittle, flake, and be blown away by the same wind that keeps the hair out of my face.

Something shifts to become thousands and thousands of shimmers of glass that break in me all at once. They have been massaged to gentle rustles by a hundred years of rumbling in the sea. Their fragility collides and I exhale, blowing them into a fine mist across the space. My material form is let go and blown away to leave a glimmering liquid of urge to be spilled out from the top only to go more upwards. I am golden across the threshold of freedom and beauty. Given to me is the leverage to finally become unstuck from a world without choice. I look and actually point out from the trailing vapor I am moving through to a place over the water. There across the bay is the most welcoming cataclysm to witness: humbling clouds born to move across the spectrum of orange and who boldly proclaim who they are. I follow away, watching myself down the path run on.

Ways down I see a wall in the path. It’s built out of the illusion of distance to a make it appear vertical. I check in. My knees that click and pop when I go up stairs are doing just fine. “This will be tough,” I hear. “Take it easy, take a breath, you’ve worked hard enough.” But my legs churn on, building up my pace ,stretching my stride like they already know the moves of the road. I start on the hill but things flatten out because my legs have known what to do the entire time. My speed slows but my legs keep moving. I’m fighting a resignation to the slant of the road and I keep myself upright and perpendicular to the neutral ground that is somewhere else right now. I keep myself upright like the earth made me to be. So much more than gravity is pulling me down but I bare my trust. Into the white and out of the mist I had set out to find and then found, I land on my porch. And she opens the door.