It wasn't the first time that something like this has happened, but it was easily the most upsetting. I felt some pain early on during the run but my pace was strong and it was almost warm out and I had run in a straight line directly away from my house, so I had to get back anyway and why not push the pace, no matter how uncomfortable I was starting to feel. Because otherwise it felt great, my legs felt sure and strong, striding, the tombstones in the graveyard over the fence gliding past me on my left. I guess I was having shin splints too but I pushed through that wave as well, look at me go. And what else can I say but that when I got home and removed my clothes I was truly horrified to discover how much blood there was and maybe even worse where it was, I gasped out loud and considered calling for help (considered crying, too) but then instead - very gingerly - I got into the shower, shaking my head, not quite able to laugh yet (although I'm laughing about it a lot now). I have run until I've drawn blood from other places a good number of times in the past year (but again, this was the worst experience, by far). I've also way more frequently played guitar until I bled, I've danced my skin open, I've screamed into microphones until there was no voice left, I've ripped through the knees of my pants while doing karaoke, knee slides during Prince's "The Beautiful Ones." Once in Alaska I tried going for a swim and, not realizing low tide was coming, got stranded about 50 yards from land, which meant I had to walk over 50 yards of coral, which meant I left a gruesome, bloody footprint in the bottom of my mint green vans, my footsteps squishing. It's not that I am tough (as I mentioned earlier I was upset when I saw the blood recently) but what I do think I have is an innate and just out-of-reach desire to rub myself away entirely, to angle grind my body out of existence, shooting sparks, to sleep in sandpaper sheets and wear away, diminish, to be an eraser at the end of a pencil furiously running back and forth over a mark that will not give in, until the pink rubber is cheese gratered away, until the green metal thing that holds the eraser on is bent and twisted away, until the yellow painted wood splinters chips away and the pencil blasts apart, shattered, atomized, it catches fire and burns, it's gone, poofed from physical existence altogether. Maybe I could run all the way off the edge, sweat myself into dust and steam, "pardon me while I burst into flames," maybe I could have a different body entirely, and not just a body that's different.

Never saw this particular look in his eye before, glassy and far off, partially because of the cold wind blowing (squinting) and partially because he was scanning the six story co-ops looking for something he recognized (looking deep into his decades, trying to get a foothold on the neighborhood like he was climbing a rockwall, not finding an anchor). We couldn't find the particular address we had from my uncle but we found a sign with a phrase he recognized and that sufficed, we took his picture in front of it (he stands so wooden in photos, same exact pose later in front of the 700,000 pound steel globe, very 19th century, a man in the wild west who has never before seen a daguerrotype camera and doesn't move a muscle for fear his face will blur). Where he was born and where he came back to visit a few times in the young years, the east coast, a place he knows in a deep but inaccessible way such that he gets lost easily but is confident in getting around nonetheless (he was born here, I've only spent 8 years dying here). He kept talking (a lot) about how "he used to wash his car every day, down here in the parking lot, used to have to watch him do it, he was the head presser at the cleaners or head steamer and the laundry or whatever it was, he was the top, he liked to show off, big car, he washed his car here, down by the parking lot." While he was saying this we were walking around - residents going about their business, a man replacing the basketball hoop net with a stepladder - and I was amazed - that familiar New York Times building where I think they probably print the newspaper everyday was just on the other side of the highway which means that almost any time I had driven out of town in the last 8 years I had passed the ancestral home and not realized it, it had happened maybe hundreds of times, the brick building where his life began was just on the other side of the onramp and here we are, me asking him to take off his hat for the photo because the brim was casting a dark line across his face and him smiling, not moving a muscle. As we were leaving he recognized the street name and I felt like we were on the verge of something, he told me that he remembered waiting for the bus on union ave on christmas eve one year. I asked him why he remembered that, standing in the cold on christmas eve (I don't think his family celebrated christmas then), you must have been young. He said at first that it wasn't that bad. A pause. And then he said that he thinks his dad and his grandpa had gotten in a fight. And that's why we were waiting for the bus. I could almost see it, there was something surfacing, coming up outta the black water lake but then that was it, black lake frozen, whatever it was trapped up under there and too far gone in the intervening decades, just outta reach, in Queens.