You can ask anyone, I do not run. I will jog, skip, dance, hop, fling myself across a room, but I will not run. It’s not for what you think. I love to run. I love the feeling of leaving everything behind. It’s the only time it is accepted that I am at a different pace. Any other time it’s, “calm down Sierra,” “be quiet Sierra,” “learn when to be unnoticeable.” With running it’s different. I’m not fast, actually far from it. And I run heavy, as if I’m stomping with every step. But when I was younger, I was fast. It was more accepted back then that I couldn’t sit still, brushed off as childish energy. I would do all my work at the speed of light  then fool around. I would eat fast so I could go play. I would run circles around my mom until she yelled at me to stop. I would run all the time.

One specific time sticks in my mind when I think of running. I was in fourth grade when my sister had her first communion. Everyone in our family came to it, including our Tio Cisco, Syd’s Godfather. Tio Cisco is a doctor and it was a surprise for him to come at all. I think I was even more excited than my sister to see him. Syd decided to go to a party after her ceremony though, leaving the large family at my small house. My mom was  tired of me running around and getting in the way and asked Tio Cisco to take me on a walk.

It was a relatively cool day for the middle of May but I didn’t care, I never use to get cold. We began our walk in the leftward direction until we hit a forest area. I had never been there before and to this day I cannot quite remember where it was located, but on that spring day I lied to my uncle and said I knew the forest route. Thankfully, after about 15 minutes it opened up to an abandoned plant market. That was when I took off running and left my uncle behind. I don’t know why and I don’t know what I planned to do, but I was running. It was the best run of my life. Everything fell into synchronization and I closed my eyes. Even though I was moving as fast as I could go, I felt like I was still for the first time in my life, like I was calm and the hyperactiveness had left my body. I think about that run a lot. When I’m stressed or just tired or get yelled at for being too much for people to handle, I think about being still as I ran for less than a minute before being called back. I think about running, my place where I’m perfectly content.