Flashes of Panic

As my father pinned his number on his shirt, I could taste the race in my mouth like tea I had not yet set to my lips.

I could feel still muscles in my legs twitching with nervous energy on the starting line, electrical pulses racing up and down the nerves like messengers before a battle. I could feel the satisfying beginnings of deep, grinding exhaustion, charging into a hill shoulder-to-shoulder with a rival I hadn’t introduced myself to yet, both of us willing the other to be weaker. I felt the crackle of energy delivered through a tongue of connective tissue to the tip of my toes as I took flight, briefly, again. I remembered every finish-line emotional wash, from the second I knew him broken to the last step over the line. I remembered being broken.

I remembered the doctor, on Friday, telling me how he thought that tongue of connective tissue will never, ever, be the same; how my gait has stretched the inelastic fascia like a dried-up rubber band, changing everything from how my foot rolls at the start of each step to the energy I can deliver with each toe-off. That the best he and I can do is take the load off it and compensate. He thinks he can do it; new inserts, and I can run again. But not the same, he didn’t say. I am a different machine, now. The hardware does not work the same way. One strand of gristle goes Pop, said the fictional Olympian, and presto, you’re a pedestrian.

The nerves, however, are the same, and the memories are stored somewhere much simpler and more primal than where I remember my phone number or my cat’s face.

I could taste them.