100 Words Per Mile: Just Keep Running

About my baby brother.

October 2, 2020
10.00 miles
1:17:02

I’m starting to feel like as long as I keep running, everything will be fine. I just need to breathe, move, sweat, hurt, smile, dream, spit, squint, cough, wave, slow, recover, and start again. If I take too long a break, something might go wrong. Maybe I’ll remember something I’d rather forget. Maybe I’ll lose the ability to start again. So much of my survival recently has depended on my ability to move. When I’m too sore to move, when I’m not busy enough to distract myself, I begin to stew. I really don’t like to stew.

At this point in the project, I’ve run a little over 74 miles.

A couple of weeks ago, my baby brother was arrested. He’s only nineteen years old. I haven’t written about it yet because I don’t want to think about it. There’s more we need to figure out, but if he goes to prison, I just don’t see how he comes out of there in one piece. He’s 6’3, one-hundred-forty pounds. On one hand, I’m scared for him. On the other, this is the punch in the face he needs from life.

He was arrested for several things, but primarily for leaving the scene of an accident without leaving any information. There are details I’m missing, details I’ll share later down the road, but the gist is he ran another car off the road, totaled his own (it’s actually his friend’s car, a friend who is on house arrest himself), and because of the many illegal things he was carrying on him, fled the scene with the two friends in the car with him.