Running Down A Dream

The fact is.. No matter how closely I study it
No matter how I take it apart
No matter how I break it down
It remains consistent.
I wish you were here to see it. - King Crimson "Indiscipline"
These were the sounds that came along to begin to describe the feeling I had. It was Friday, and I was going on a run. Nothing gargantually different there. But this was the run I took in Boulder, Colorado. It was the morning of my niece's graduation, and I was up before the rest of my family, so I laced up my shoes and went out into the just-above-freezing morning.
I knew what I would see, because as I have mentioned on several occasions previous, this geography is burned into the screen of my memory. Still, there I was, coming down the hill just a few blocks from my mother's house and looking to the west. There they were. The sign that I had returned home. The foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It might have been the altitude, or the short time I spent asleep the night before. It could have been the time change or the anticipation of a big day ahead of me. But I think it was most likely that thing: Home. I was running through a neighborhood where my mother and my older brother live. Where I had lived for the first thirty years of my life. Home.
As continued on my loop and made my way back north again, I went past what was, many years ago, the video store I worked at until it stopped working. I noticed the back door, and remembered a Fourth of July when my best friend and I shot pop bottle rockets out over the street behind. It was at that moment that the iPod began playing Billy Idol, as a tribute to those blurry days and nights back in the eighties when we were indestructible young men. And that's when I realized the road I was running on would eventually wind into the mountains, and pass by the spot where our other best friend breathed his last. I felt that feeling mix in with the euphoria and nostalgia in a swirl of sentiment that isn't often found in my cynical fore brain.
When I returned to my mother's house, I made a note to look for the beauty in Oakland the next time I ran there. Home.