Open on an empty football field. It’s night. Rolling fog is illuminated by the bright stadium lights.
The human body is built for glory.
For triumph.
For experiencing sudden, inexplicable knee pain when you walk up stairs too fast.
A montage of faces, determined and beaded with sweat.
So you push.
You forge ahead.
You download a Couch-to-5K app. But you can’t start it this week because you have a cold.
It feels like you’ve had a cold for six years.
Having kids will do that.
Pan over a crowd of cheering fans.
But tenacity runs in your veins.
Your marrow is marbled with grit.
So you get up.
You dust yourself off.
You run six blocks, get shin splints, and sheepishly walk home listening to a playlist called “Trap Tracks to Sweat to 2K24.”
The sun rises over Yankee Stadium.
You were made to recover.
To bounce back.
To do something weird with your arm when you’re putting on a duvet cover, so then you have a “shoulder thing.” But it’s not there all the time and it’s hard to explain.
To persevere.
To achieve greatness.
To hear the orthopedic specialist say that there’s no mechanical problem apparent on the X-Ray and for you to ask, “Can we do an MRI?,” and for the insurance company to not grant a prior authorization unless you complete six weeks of physical therapy first.
Performers in monochromatic costumes dance in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe.
So you persist. You fight. You think, Well, I’m definitely hitting my deductible this year.
So you imagine what other medical stuff you could do while you’re at it and decide to get your moles checked.
And then you kinda drop the ball.
And at some point you just accept not being able to reach overhead anymore.
You wonder, Why do scars make you look “cool” but a torn labrum makes you look “fragile”?
So you shift your focus back to lower-body exercises.
You walk, run, sprint, herniate a disk, run again, but slower, because your knee thing is back.
Horses galloping across the Western plains.
Who told you life was easy?
“Easy” only exists in movies.
Life is not a movie.
If it were a movie, its genre would be body horror. It would be directed by David Cronenberg, and it would thematically explore how disgusting it is to be made of organic stuff.
Montage of Kristi Yamaguchi freestyle skating.
So you start to think that maybe the guy from “The Matrix” who bails on reality to eat software steak had a point. I mean, you used to laugh at youths for spending real money on clothes for their digital avatars, but then you realized that you buy irreverent T-shirts from Online Ceramics to look cool on Zoom, and that’s pretty much the same thing. So you research uploading your consciousness to the cloud. But you read that even if/when that’s possible, there will be no guarantee that there’ll never be an interruption in your consciousness. So, it might be a perfect copy of your mind, but you (the you you know) would be dead. And that freaks you out.
So you re-download the Couch-to-5K app.
Because legends aren’t born.
They’re made.
And on day three you twist your ankle.
Slow-motion footage of Michael Jordan dunking a basketball. ♦
