The Proclivity to Run

A warm and rough coconut nestled between her hands as the hammock cradled her lithe yet bountiful form. Her skin felt soft and sensitive from her lover’s hands the night before and the sun warmed her from the inside out, a sensual roast. She didn’t realize it at the time, but the urge to run was gnawing at her heels again. The subtle impulse wrapped around her ankles and guided her toward the sea, the mountains, the jungle, the people she still had yet to meet; it crawled over her shoulders, pulling her heart back into the unknown and the wild.

She had the propensity to run. To explore the world with untangled heart strings and a palpable independence from others; for she knew that she had everything she needed inside herself. She was without a man, no regular lover or life companion and she preferred it that way. With no man and a wandering nature, she had become a voyeur of the mundane and a guard of requisite things, cherishing the simplest moments and documenting them. She searched for experiences and interesting people, collecting them in her journals. Thousands of pages filled with stories written to feel everything, to inwardly experience all that she could.

The fear of an empty bed didn’t plague her for her bed was always filled. It was filled with her dreams and her books and there was plenty of space for her daily stretches of the body and mind. The occasional lover came and went, playing her games of secrets and laughter, pleasure and honesty. He filled her small and colorful room with his powerful ethos of masculinity until her sheets and paintings begged for dreams and creativity once more. She relented, happy to welcome herself back, alone, into her private cove.

She always kept them in her thoughts, her lovers were the sweet center of her life’s research. She cherished them for each man had his own charisma and charm. In a way she loved all of them; even the ones who eventually proved unworthy through a series of bad habits making them entirely undesirable. Each man was brimming with lessons and wisdom. In the lightness of her bed his eyes and body confessed secrets, he offered up whispered trinkets into her ears; surrendering his desire to her.

Her joy of life had the un-restrainable need to be spread out, given freely, to new lovers, loyal friends, and unexplored locations. In stagnation, her bones felt weak, her face colorless and eyes dulled, energy waning like that of the moon’s brightness in the nights following it’s apex. Drained despondence was the betraying clue indicating that very soon she would pull away, back to center. Inspiring her to run back to herself with an independence so palpable that her next lover was unknowingly waiting for her, feeling his bones shiver with the anticipation of her fullness.

Her proclivity to run was often met with resistant lovers angry and wounded by her flight. But she could never belong to anyone. She had no desire to be a prize, for a prize, no matter how you look at it, directly represents the accomplishments of and gives prestige to the trophy-holder rather than the trophy itself.

She was full of life, a quality which she gave credit to no one except her own self-possession and her parents who taught her the value of feeling and expressing to the fullest degree. Her presence represented and reflected upon only her own person and she preferred it that way.

She planted her feet in front of the hammock and slowly lifted herself out of it’s gentle cocoon. Letting the impulse to run and the unwavering desire to be free engulf her, she seamlessly made her way to the ocean. She walked on the beach like a snake, moving with the sand rather than on it or through it. Fluid and flowing, she let the waves lap at her ankles as she waded in, gently, purposefully, totally.