Running through my head

I came home to an empty house. J was still at work, and I had dropped my mom off at the airport earlier after her two-week visit here. Even the otherwise very talkative cats were quiet. It was eerie.

I have the kind of job where I have to actively interact with lots of different people in a loud environment all day, every day. By the time I finish work I am usually mentally exhausted. This kind of job will do that to you, if you're an introvert like I am. Silence is a welcome change, solitude a respite. But today, the same silence I usually seek in order to recharge after work felt strange, unfamiliar.

I went looking for a different kind of silence, the kind you find running in the woods, thinking it would help me get my thoughts in order. As the jingle of the ice-cream truck faded away in the distance, the voices in my head got louder. Conversations with family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues I'd had earlier today, conversations from days ago, older conversations still made my head buzz. I pressed pause, rewound, replayed them. I tried out different answers, different outcomes. I said something nice instead of something mean, I shouted in anger instead of keeping quiet, I kept quiet instead of saying something stupid. Nothing changed. The things I hadn't said remained unsaid, the things that I had said remained etched in memory. All that brooding did was give me temporary relief from keeping my thoughts bottled up for so long.

The technical trail demanded my attention. I skipped between stones and roots, lost in my thoughts. I almost twisted my ankle, distracted and unobservant as I was. When I got home, J was back. The silence that had haunted the house earlier was gone. We don't always need to speak to communicate what we want and how we're feeling. We're so in tune with each other, we just know. But with others, it's not as easy to say the right thing at the right time.

I wish I could be clearer, make my voice speak as loudly and eloquently as it does in my head while I'm running. Maybe then I wouldn't need to risk twisting an ankle.