by Vinson » Mon Sep 30, 2024 6:28 pm
Username: Vinson
Name: Suzzallo's The More You Love The More You Lose 'Theo'
Gender: FTM (he/him)
Name Meaning: a diminutive of the names Theodore (gift of god) and Theobald (bold, brave people)
Prompt:
The crunch of gravel underfoot, ground soaked through underneath from last night's rain. A chill in the air, enough to numb fingertips but not turn exhales to fog, flushing exposed skin the color of a ripening peach with hairs standing on end. There's pine sap and sweet sage and the death of summer, if you close your eyes and really hold the scent in the back of your throat.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Bend down and pluck lamb's ear from its stalk, run silky leaves between fingers that can't quite feel it right, nails tinged blue. The sun just broke over the plain not too long ago, rays warm only in color, gold filtering through the fields as the corn stalks shiver. Ears cold, too, hair the color of the fields the color of a mouse's back the color of your mother's pulled back into a thick braid, split ends and all.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Tomorrow you'll be in your Sunday best, shoes too tight over top of lacy socks underneath a dress that's been worn by three sisters before you, each one leaving a bit of them in its weave and thread. But that doesn't matter right now, just focus, shove hands into the kangaroo pocket of your hoodie and roll your shoulders, shift weight from hip to hip, curl toes, flex each muscle and feel the tension just to let it go.
Heart beats steady in your chest as you warm up, wrestle the hoodie over your head and shuck sweatpants off without taking the shoes off your feet. Feel it stutter as coach waves from the starting line and shouts for his varsity girls to come do their run-outs. You all look the same, in blue spandex and white racing tanks, but you're the only one tugging at the front hemline.
Breathe in.
The single shot of a gun into the air, a quick crack-pop, hits like a bolt of lightning through your veins as practiced muscles tense and spring forward.
Breathe out.
"Go go go go go!"
---
When your English teacher asks what you want to do after high school, it's quiet in her room for quite a while. Maybe there's a phantom of a cricket chirping outside when you shrug and finally meet her gaze, patient, waiting for your answer. You don't think she'll be impressed with the eloquence (or lack thereof) of the words that somehow took you several minutes to find the courage to speak out loud.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
"I don't know." I didn't think I'd make it this far. "Just...I want to go somewhere else." If I stay here it'll kill me.
Her smile is soft, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes just barely starting to show.
"Small town life isn't for you? Well, that's alright, dear. You've got a good head on your shoulders, and those legs of yours may be able to take you further than you think," she said with a bit of a wink, reaching into the top drawer of her desk and sliding you a small stack of papers and pamphlets and brochures and business cards. You must look confused as you rifle through them, the names of twenty different colleges bright and bold, happy students smiling at you as your eyes catch and stall on the words 'athletic scholarships', because she reaches her hand out and places it on top of yours, thumb gentle and soothing on the tops of your knuckles.
"Heather - keep running like you did this weekend and you might find yourself running down a different path than the one y'all practice on behind Jack's farm."
And oh, what you wouldn't give to trade that dusty old game trail in for city streets or suburban sprawl, anywhere besides here, the place where you grew up and your parents grew up and their parents grew up, an endless cycle, a town with one blinking red stoplight, where everyone knows everyone - or at least, they think they do.
But they don't know you. Or if they do, they refuse to see it, instead watch it lie smoldering or curdling under the surface of your skin, eating you from the inside out, twisting and tearing to be released, but it cannot be set free here.
And you've just been given a one-way ticket out.
---
"Why do you run?" Your first roommate asks as you lay awake in your dorm room, staring into the black void of the ceiling. You take a minute to try and conjure up a coherent explanation, but it seems you can't. Instead, you say -
"Why do you breathe?"
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
"Because I have to? To live?" She answers, and you twist your covers over you, turning to press the side of your face into your pillow, just to hear the slow thump-thump of your heartbeat echoed through your ear.
"And I have to run to live," You answer back, curling your hands in towards yourself, tensing the muscles in your legs to draw them in closer to your body, tightened into a taught coil.
It's almost quiet for a moment until a siren starts to wail outside, and you can't help but feel grateful for the noise of the traffic, the lights flashing on the other side of your window instead of the dead dark silence back home.
She hums, not seeming to understand, but that's alright. She doesn't have to.
Tomorrow your parents will leave and you'll cut off six inches of hair and memory, the shortest it's been since you were in grade school. The happiest you've been since you were in grade school.
---
"Why do you still run, Theo?" Your last college roommate asks as you paint each other's nails on the couch in your living room. You thrifted it and stopped speaking to your parents two years ago, the cushions as threadbare as the relationship you've managed to hold onto with your oldest brother.
"I have to," you answer plainly, but it's more than that. "I need the scholarship to afford the tuition," but it's more than that too.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
You think of where your legs have taken you as you look down at your runner's feet, callouses on the insides of your heels, a blister on the second and third toe of your right, a bruised toenail hidden under baby blue polish on your left.
And you know why they're asking. If you've learned anything in college, it's that seemingly simple questions can have so many meanings. But instead you shrug, pretend you didn't catch it, pretend it doesn't bother you, that the very thing that allowed you to be here is holding you back. But you've got a doctor's appointment made at the school's health clinic for the day after the season ends, have been counting down the days for both reasons - that it's the last time you'll run competitively in college, and the first day of the rest of your life.
And maybe, for the first time, you're running towards something instead of away from it.
