3650 DAYS

It will be ten years tomorrow. Three thousand six hundred and fifty days. It's an anniversary of sorts, but not an anniversary that just anyone gets to celebrate. It's about shedding skin, about disentangling from the razor wire, a profound decade long cleansing. It's about taking the rage and fluttering anxiety and converting it to meditation and motion and it is a gift.

I wish I could say that it was a distant memory, that the scars, both internal and external, have faded into the landscape, but they never will. It's better that way. Better to be reminded than to submit to the built in forgetter. For some the forgetter is survival mechanism, an adaptation that makes life bearable. For others, like me, it loads another round into the chamber and gives me free reign to repeat the same terrible mistakes in an endless loop. I try to keep my failures close and to pull them into view only when I lose my way. I have a failed marriage, a history of violence, millions of miles of poorly wired circuitry, and a fall back position that is set to self-destruct in my quiver. I try my best to use them to help rather than hinder my path. It used to be just the opposite. When the unravelling would commence I would seek out only what sped the process, and I would grind away until there was almost nothing left of me. Now I drag my scars and faulty wiring into the woods where I run to the sound of my own breath, my feet traveling above crushed leaves, stone, and standing water, and I imagine that I can hear the faint sound of tearing muscle fibers as I transform myself into a new machine.

Tomorrow morning I'll wake up shortly after sunrise and celebrate in silence by running one mile for every year since I left that life and joined this. HELL YEAH.

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another." Anatole France