High school sports, boys and girls, sweat, the beginning of sex, and beverages (1/2)

The boys on the cross country team drank cool water from stainless steel bottles. They were thin boys and their legs were long. Good bones, good breeding. Not necessarily tall, but having the appearance of height, because of the thinness, because of the posture. What else? Neurotic. Often pretty. Particular, sometimes to the point of pain. Preferring silence, preferring solitude, drinking things like pickle juice in preparation for races. 

The races were not easy, but they were simple. A mutually intelligible symbol that means GO, and a mutually intelligible symbol that means STOP. The boys’ race happened before the girls’. We would stand at the finish line and cheer for the boys as they came in and then collapsed. Not trying to impress us necessarily. Trying to impress themselves. And maybe part of that was impressing us.

Watching these boys run towards me¹ my heart and legs would clench, and I thought, so this is what falling in love will feel like, when it happens. But nothing has felt like that since, not even falling in love. 

About this phrase “falling in love.” Nothing about it appeals to me. Neither the klutzy implications of injury nor the image of love as a big hole. I don’t want to fall in love, I want to rise in it.²

Some alternatives: "descer a ladeira no trenó do amor” (Portuguese: going down a hill on the sled of love), “estar en las nubes” (Spanish: to be in the clouds of love).

Images stacked into metaphors stacked on top of each other in the shape of people. I find myself wanting a simpler language. Anyways, in my opinion, if love is to be compared to anything, it should be compared not to altitude but to light.

Then again, in the post-cross-country years, the feeling I became most familiar with was neither the feeling of falling nor rising but the feeling of sitting somewhere on an okay-horrible date. I would want to impress them, and they would know this, and they would not be impressed, and I would know this. I don’t belong here, I would think. I thought I didn't belong anywhere. Insecurity and ego - you can’t have one without the other. But unlike every other boy at every bar or coffee shop, the boys on the cross country team never made me feel like I was being found out as a liar, or worse, like I was getting away with lying.

Instead it felt like exactly what it was. Cool water from a stainless steel bottle, and a mutually intelligible language: GO. And there you go, fast and slow, moving through woods that become roads, roads that become other roads, paths that become entire graphs, branches of trees, arteries and veins, metaphors stacked on metaphors.

See. Too many metaphors. Trying to impress myself. By impressing you. Nothing about this appeals to me anymore.

In Philly, the runners run towards Center City in the mornings, and West Philly in the afternoons. They’re trying to follow the light. I don’t expect that light to save me, but if there’s something on this earth that’s true, that’s worth chasing, worth collapsing for, well pretty boy, I think this is it.

1. well, they were not running towards me, they were running towards my direction. even at 15 it is important for a girl to understand the difference

2. “I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.” Toni Morrison, Jazz