Our yard is decaying again. The leaves have fallen – stripped from the skeletal trees that loom solemnly over our lawn. I sit on the front steps of the place I call home and survey our suburban neighborhood with familiarity.
I used to come to these steps a lot in high school and sit for hours under the half-dead tree in front of our house. There was something awful and beautiful about that tree, the way half its limbs would liven up with foliage each spring, and the other half would continue to rot.
My senior year, I would stare at that hideous tree endlessly, too tired to go to school, an oxygen cannula hanging from my nostrils, gas tank by my side. Docs told me my heart was failing. I sat on those steps almost every day, waiting. But I don’t know what I was waiting for. This body had failed me for years. I didn’t expect much from the world then, but I seemed to be content. My parents had hidden the truth from me, possibly in denial themselves: I was dying.
That was my life two years ago. But the transplant had come, and then I had to run off to college, move out, grow up.
I come home often to escape dorm life, to crawl out of this aged skin, but these steps don’t feel the same. I’m a deluded 20-year-old home from college now, not the resigned adolescent that used to sit here in isolation.
As an undergraduate, my self-absorption is never ending, as I sort out what I want to do with my life and plan my future with ecstasy. There’s no time to sit and wait. I have a sudden longing to run. These feet can take me places now, uninhibited by the shackles of disease. Beneath me, my legs begin moving. I don’t know where I’m going, but I must stay in motion.
It’s fascinating that a body can come alive like this, allow us to navigate the landscape before us. As I run, I can feel my blood pulse across a web of arteries. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt adrenaline.
I rarely understand my body anymore. Muscles have begun to etch across my calves and arms and I no longer feel like my bones will snap.
Most of us can endure more than we know – within us, as cells die, others are born. Our bodies are enchanting things that break and burn but are fixed and cooled with time.
I pause for air and breathe. The semester is almost over. For several months, we’ve consumed our souls in the name of education. We’ve been running, but it’s time for a break. The finish line is infinite miles away. There will always be things to do, and change will come. But let’s sit for some time. We can await the sun beneath the half-dead tree.
Tarif Haque is a sophomore majoring in computer science. His column runs on Tuesdays.
