PETRICHOR I’m charging, my foot smashes into the dry, cracking ground with every passion-filled stomp. I’m mesmerized by the shattering of the earth into every which way, imagining that I too had as much freedom and possibility as the empty space slicing through the earth. I believed it. But it wasn’t until the endless paths of cracks beneath my clommering feet crumpled into dust that I realized I was only running in a circle... And you lied. You blew your whistle and I sweat-- but there’s no pleasure in oblivion. The strength of my stride meant nothing when my eyes weren’t straight ahead. And now, all I saw were deep, dark, purple circles ingrained into the earth I once loved, and then you... in your sunglasses, lounging on a beach chair and silently checking the time, surrounded by the barren desert wasteland expanding radially in every direction around us. My lips were cracked from the hot sun and yet I managed to cry. Now all those possibilities sprouting through the desert earth and my sun-baked skin only seemed to hurt. I had stopped, but I was running so long that the stillness made everything spin. My mind looped, flipping over on top of itself again and again. All I could see were cracks. I wondered if maybe, I should just start running again... But it seemed I had nowhere to go. It turns out that if you wish to live like the ever-expanding, jagged and chaotic cracks in the earth, branching infinitesimally, eventually, you’re going to have to fall in.