“You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.” –Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

This is not only my new favorite quote, it’s the quote that most perfectly sums up my life lately. It’s so perfect that I want to have it tattooed on my foot.

Because I have been running, literally and metaphorically, through many of these mild autumn nights. I’ve been racking up miles my car can’t handle, spending more than I can afford on gas, taking hours to flee when I need to devote that time to other things. I lose myself on back roads that wind past fields of ripe cotton and stands of pine trees and murky swamps where I imagine alligators and cottonmouths. If there’s no oncoming traffic, I swerve to avoid hitting the frogs that hop across the road. Occasionally an armadillo or a possum snuffles along the shoulder. Sometimes a jacked-up truck with Confederate plates roars up behind me and blinds me with its neon headlights until the driver gets impatient and passes me. Sometimes the air is so humid that moisture hangs in the hollows like fog. I scream along with the songs on my iPod, songs that make me feel invincible and fierce, others that always trigger an ache, reminders of what I’ve never had or what I’ve lost.

Other times I run with my dog, in the park or across the lot at my apartment complex. He’s no longer young, my Bishop, and a life of hard wear on his shoulders shows now in the occasional stumble or limp. But he loves to run. He’s gentler with me than he used to be; he knows I’m dead weight on the end of the leash and he doesn’t go all-out full-tilt anymore. He gallops along with his tongue out, spittle flecking his muzzle, a big old doggy grin on his face.

But occasionally he’ll still go faster than I can keep up with, and there’s this exhilarating, terrifying moment in which I realize that I’m experiencing speed over which I have no control. I’m at the mercy of my dog and my feet, and it’s pure joy and delirious panic and adrenaline.

Tonight we ran because we had to and because this is a night made for running, a windy autumn night with an almost full moon and a cloudy sky and dead leaves fluttering from the trees. Halloween is days away. The time of year I love is dying, and the holiday-filled months that I dread are about to begin–Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, my birthday, Valentine’s Day. All reminders that another year has passed, more time marked off the calendar and lost forever, and too many of my dreams remain unfulfilled, most of my goals unachieved. If I could, I would hibernate from All Saint’s Day to Mardi Gras rather than endure those bleak, hopeless months of winter.

So I run like the devil is chasing me, because he is. The devil, time, the shadow of death. The knowledge that my dog has a finite number of runs left in those greyhound legs. That I have a finite number of runs left in my own legs and feet. That I have a finite number of October nights left to cherish and enjoy, to race through even as I desperately try to slow time.

No matter how okay or even good some parts of my life are now, I live with a constant sadness, a sense of loss and regret and mourning for the things I’ve always wanted and have never had. People who have these things sometimes try to tell me I don’t need them, or they aren’t as wonderful as I think, or I need to square my shoulders and make the best of the life I have and not the life I wish I had. I choose to believe that these people mean well and simply have no clue how devastating and cruel their words are. I understand that your life isn’t perfect either; you have bad days and crises and disappointments and sometimes you just want to scream. But overall it’s a good life. You wouldn’t trade it for mine. So don’t tell me I need to settle for a life that’s a consolation prize.

Almost every night I go through a bad patch. Almost every night my shadows or demons or whatever you want to call them rise up. And that’s why I’ve started driving, because if I get out, at least I’m doing something, at least there’s movement, at least I’m making something happen, even if it’s just making miles of road disappear beneath my tires. Because I can’t force things to work out for me. I can’t force God to cut me any breaks. And sometimes I just can’t stand being in my head.

Tonight Bishop and I ran through the field where we no longer take walks because of the danger of snakes in the high grass. I’ve seen only garter snakes there, although I’ve smelled both cucumbers and musk, and depending whom you ask, that means copperheads and cottonmouths, or cottonmouths and rattlers. I have snakeproof boots, of course, but Bishop does not. So we didn’t run into the grass but only along a gravel wash, and he put on a burst of speed and I felt that dizzying sense of being out of control, and then he spotted one of the feral cats who live back there and swerved away from me. For a second I thought I’d have to let go of the leash or take a hard fall on the stones. I might have screamed a little. But if I did, it was a scream of pure pleasure and insanity and that heady sense of being on the edge.

It was a good night, a beautiful night, a night perfect for running.

The problem with running is that you have to stop. And now that I’ve stopped, the things that stressed me out before are stressing me out again, and the sadness is creeping back around the edges like it always does, and nothing’s really changed, except that Bishop and I have one fewer perfect October night left in our lives.

At least we cherished this one.