Another dusk run through High Park to melt off the day’s malaise in the oppressive, comforting humidity of mid August overgrowth. On a previous outing a fellow runner extolled as we crossed paths, “watch out for the toads!” such was the saturation level.
The air is just as thick this night, the light equally faint – the trails better understood by feel than sight. Approaching a rise, a voice calls out with a sharpness assumed to be the common call for an errant dog. Clearing the rise, ambient yellow light breaks intermittently through the burdened foliage. At first the effect is similar to catching sight of a luminous deep-sea jellyfish, its pulses bobbing into and out of view. Soon though, structured geometric forms begin to take shape and bind onto the growing voices.
Closing on and passing the twilight theatre that sits on the high ground to the south of the trail, actors, congested on an illuminated stage project their personae onto the audience but also out into the surrounding trails.
Sweat falls in oppressive pools down my spine and stomach.
One foot striking in front of the other.
One grizzled knee compressing a battered shin into an ankle,
a noticeable “click” emanating with each foot’s weathered turn pushing me forward at a pace too fast to fully enjoy the world.
Who are these people, presently defined by artifice and luminescence? Who am I to believe my own structured and collapsing existence is any more valid, any less fleeting or any less of a show?
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