New York City

The first evening of spring weather, air cool, dry, and clear, lights crisp and sun setting a deep warm band behind the building across the water. You want to run in this weather because you want to dissolve into it, open your lungs and take deep draws of the air. It’s air like water at body temperature, so you almost fail to notice that you’ve slipped into it. It’s the kind of air you want to float naked in. Running on a night like this you feel yourself merge with the sky in a way you cannot do by walking, or by running under clouds. It can make everything feel perfect, all the little glimmers of beauty in the day stand out and set while everything else—the anxieties that chase you through your days, the fears and failures–recedes.

Right before I left to run tonight I was reading an essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review about the migrant crisis, the words of a photographer who’d gone to shoot the rescue of a boat full of refugees that was sinking in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. “I imagined search-and-rescue missions as crashing through waves to reach a vessel in distress in traumatic weather. But it isn’t like that on the Med. It’s clear-bue water, a beautiful blue sky. This gorgeous blue boat is filled with people….And suddenly you’re confronted with it: On what should be a beautiful day, there they are, risking their lives on a boat that’s sinking.” @vqreview #whyirun #running #drowning (at Williamsburg Bridge)

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