Racing Morning

She sprinted towards the hills rising swollen and pregnant with thistle and overripe blackberries, her determination creasing the space between her eyes. The sun was not yet risen but she couldn't quite tell, the clouds swaddled the sky in grey-soaked cotton and hid any brightness from view. Beneath her, the New Town's lights were still blinking through the early morning darkness and she felt caught in the limbo between night and not quite waking. She was racing the sun; she wanted to see it rise above the extinct volcano as if it were acknowledging her presence, as if the brightness would blind her like the fireworks over Montmartre and it would all make sense. She wanted immediacy, she wanted the suddenness of beauty to stun her out of the cotton wool fog of greyness that she had been wading through for years. She wanted the sun to be brighter than gold, and she panicked as she thought she saw the darkness lightening. She was at the foot of the hill now, the winding path snaking like an unkept promise to the rugged tower of broken lava rock. She walked faster now, her lungs accepting the cold air, in and out, in and out. She remembered the last time she had been someplace like this, the last time she had seen never ending fields strewn with tall, dying grass and the way the clouds enveloped the landscape. She remembered that place, months ago, a different season, the height of summer. She had been with them, and they had laughed and ran and rolled through the dead grass and rocky paths. She was alone now, a singularity in a world of pairs. She walked slower as the realization settled upon her like gravel dust. She could handle being alone, liked the way she wrote her future like she could decide which adjectives would loop together to form her life. She liked the way the air felt around her, clean and open wide like possibility. But she hated the moments like this, the ones bursting with nostalgia, the inches between the seconds when she needed somebody, someone next to her to fill that open space, someone to save her from simply talking to the wind as it ran long fingers through her hair. So she climbed faster towards the crest of the rubble, to the spot where the clouds seemed to be breaking like hardened magma to reveal the brightening sky. She had missed it, she thought, the sun already risen and her hopes for sudden beauty dashed. She breathed heavier against the sharp incline, losing her footing on the rain-soaked grass and slamming her right leg against wet rocks. She looked upwards toward the taunting cliffs and her cheeks flushed rose.

           And then she turned around, catching the breath escaping from her tired lungs faster than the sun was climbing in the sky. She saw the sea, stretched out like surrender to the way the clouds were still heavy like a blanket. She saw the islands, far off and broken up like jigsaw pieces scattered by the wind. She saw the city, geometrically architectured and punctuated by the castle crumbling to the left and the pillars of the national monument dwarfed my her position on the hill. She noticed everything quickly, all at once, then little by little, gradually, her eyes registering every detail of pleated landscape and gold-shedding autumn tree. She noticed the swans, crisp white by the shimmering loch, the way the crows (or were they ravens?) arced and swooped against the sky. She noticed the varying shades of green and yellow in the grass. And she realized that's the way it was with beautiful things. She realized the sky had been lightening like a watercolourist adding water to his paints, the fabric of the sky slowly being washed out from the indigo of dawn to the azure of morning. She realized it was a process, this beauty. It didn't happen with suddenness, with a breathtaking moment of realization.  It took hours for the night to bleed into morning and she realized darkness had so many layers to shed before light. And she saw the sun, peeking out from a rip in the clouds. And she wasn't at the top yet, but it didn't matter. She was breathing and the sun was rising and the landscape stretched around her and she had made it. Not to the top, but here. She had made it here and she was alive and it was okay. She was okay.

        She climbed to the top and the wind whipped her face and sucked tears from her eyes and she climbed down somehow more whole than he had been before. She was no longer a shell of failures and fading scars and rising loneliness. She was no longer a strip of tattered fabric racing the sun for a place in the sky. And she was no longer empty. She skipped at one point, running down the steep slope, her black sneakers hopping over rocks as the smallest thread of laughter escaped her lips.