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I used to live on the North Shore in Covington in the 1980s. I had bought a house with my first husband off of Old Military Road because I was on a quest to recapture the joy I had known staying in the country with my grandmother when I was young. I was also running a lot during those days and had a great route that took me down a road that had woods on both sides and houses only here and there. It was that rural run that made me feel so at one with the world and at peace with myself.

Until the morning I had gone out for my run and a car was coming down the road from behind and slowed down considerably causing the hairs on my neck to stand up. I turned a couple of times till the car had pulled up rather close and the man driving said, “You like running on this road don’t you? I’ve been watching you run here.” I did not engage – neither smiling to appear nonplussed nor telling him to fuck off appearing crazy – I didn’t do anything but stare straight ahead and keep running and calculating where the next house was because I was scared shitless.

He drove off as another car was approaching, but several minutes had passed and I had lived several lives in the interim. When I got home, I was shaking and I called my husband and told him what had happened. He told me not to run down that street alone again, but I said to myself and to him that I wasn’t going to let that guy defeat me or take away my simple pleasures.

Then the next morning came, and I couldn’t return to the road. And another morning came where I still couldn’t return to the road. And after many mornings of not returning to the road, my fear became rage because the perp in the car had won – he had taken away my feeling of safety and peace. I was furious.

And weeks passed of my fury and rage until I realized there was not much I could do about it. I could bravely go back to the road but that could be stupid because how would I defend myself against a man and a car? So I accepted defeat and I began to find other places to run but they were along busy streets, but eventually because they brought me no peace competing with traffic and noise, I quit running all together on the North Shore.

I thought about this as I watched Boston in lock down mode and as I read the email from an ex colleague who was running the marathon, who said she would run again next year. We can’t let fear hold us back. We cannot. But sometimes we have to accept that our sense of the world, our perception of safety and protection, of the certainty of the status quo, have been irrevocably altered and our minds can never go back to that time of innocence.

It’s Paradise Lost.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 19th, 2013 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.