Writing and Running

Something is wrong. Something is definitely wrong. At this time and place, I can’t get a handle on it. I’d like to be happy, successful, wealthy, independent, but at the moment, I don’t feel any of those things. How did I arrive at this state?
In April of 2001, I left my home in New York, left my previous life behind and moved to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico, not least of all to begin something different, something fresh, something that had no resemblance to the life that had turned sad for me. I had mixed expectations and only a vague awareness of what awaited me here.
I guess I’m hoping now if I write about my experiences that I’ll be able to make some sense out of where I’ve placed myself. At the time I made this move, I felt very brave and some of the people around me said they envied me making such a decision. They seemed to think I was leaving the rat race behind and moving to fun in the sun—a permanent vacation of lying on a beach with a cold beer beside me and music playing. I guess I saw that too. I had been to Mexico before—the resort areas—and I think that’s what I really wanted. No obligations, no responsibilities, no attachment to things that turn sad.
I couldn’t see then that vacations are the way they are because they are not permanent. That it is their very fleetingness that charges them full of memories of lassitude and drains them of a sense of responsibility. You try to turn them into lasting situations and they morph into some halfway limbo condition.
In any case, there’s no beach here. It’s a three-hour drive away, and I’ve been there twice in a period of more than two years.
In looking back over one’s life, the good times sparkle like diamonds or bits of gold among the dross of the quotidian and one longs to relive them, to gather them together and make an other life out of them. One doesn’t see that they glitter precisely because of their juxtaposition against the ungleaming days and months. It takes the mistake of trying to do such a thing to recognize the folly of feeling that way.
Firstly, in the long view of hindsight, one doesn’t see that those bits were not faultless, but in gathering them together, in trying to relive them, their faults become magnified.
There are thousands of bugs, tiny ants, crawling over them, whose presence, when perceived, is an irritation. Then too, there is the fact that nothing can really happen the same way twice. So, yes, it is folly to believe one can recapture something that perhaps had been perceived incorrectly in the first place.
That being said, I find myself now in this place in the middle of a race toward a goal I already know will not satisfy, unable to return to a starting line that has been eradicated. Nor can I take off these uncomfortable running shoes to sit on the sidelines for a few moments to get my bearings. There are spectators who have come to watch, expecting a winner, and if I don’t keep moving, then I am just an impediment to the other racers.
The thing is, I want to keep running. I want to win. I want to hear the cheers of victory. I’m afraid, though, that I won’t stop to collect a trophy. I’ll just keep running long after the race is finished, and the spectators have gone home. I’ll keep running and running as I don’t have any home to go to.