Sarah LeComte

As a few friends have suggested to me that I appear to “have my shit together” recently, I feel compelled to set the record right. Lest my wide-swinging dimensionality be flattened and sanitized! 🤣

A brutiful side quest over the weekend. Type 2 fun to purge the demons. Perpetua Coast Trail Race. 20 miles and a fair bit of vert. I finished 15 minutes before cutoff, went straight to my car and cried my heart out from Yachats to Newport. One of them good old fashioned ugly, heaving hope- nobody-sees-this cries. But I’m gonna tell you about it anyway because bruises are part of our shared humanity. There’s no prize for concealing them and the opportunity cost is connection based on what is *real*.

I cried for my mom, my niece Brielle, for my family’s pain at these losses, for friends facing their own impossible losses right now, for the state of this country and humankind across the earth, for the years of my life I underlived and abused my body, for things I may be taking for granted presently, for women still living with a boot on their necks, for everything this vessel and heart have been through, for those suffering a world away and a street corner over.

Do things ever hit you all at once? From micro to macro? Sometimes it feels like all the world’s suffering lands like an anvil and splits my chest open. It’s like, shit, could we just feel one thing at a time, perhaps? Would subscribe. I know I’m not alone in always carrying grief on my hip like a child, sometimes still, sometimes screaming.

Sometimes all the relentless doing and going feels like trying to patch up hurt with forward momentum. Distraction in distance covered. I think part of all that spilled emotion was meeting a part of myself after mile 20 that still feels like I’m trying to get somewhere I’ll never quite reach. A place before pain. Racing to cover the ground between who I am and who I want to be. Always just out of reach and also somehow always a little furnace just beneath the ribcage. Exhausting and animating. I am. Suffering. Striving. Singing. Crying. Cyclically, I am the cloud and then, for a moment, I am above the clouds.