Being in love is like living with your balls in a vice.  It exerts just enough pressure to keep you from moving.  You try to leave, but the pressure grows.  You want to think it’ll be like ripping off a bandage, but when you try to pry yourself away some Warning Light goes off in your brain:

Testicle Rupture Imminent!

Being obsessed is better.  And worse.

With obsession, the squeeze comes faster.  Tighter.  It seeps into your veins like acid.  Grabs your brain.  It doesn’t tell you what to do.  Obsession lays it out in front of you, like a road map, and denies you any other option.  By the time you know what’s happening, you’re in a 12 step program.

Or wrapped around the steering wheel.

Obsession is a razor’s edge.  It hurts to walk it, and the fall will split you in half.  But it hurts so good.

I know that ache.  I know that pain.  Single minded.  Stupid.  Lizard Brain.

I know every detail of the object of my affection.  I know them with my eyes closed.  I can trace the checkering with my fingertips, feel that cold iron through my callouses.  Where the tips of my fingers fail, numb and plastic, I scratch with my nails for the marks that help me find my spacing on the bar.

For fifteen years I have manipulated the weight in every way possible.  I have torn every fiber of muscle in my body.  Strained tendons and ligaments.  Shredded cartilage.

It’s a disgusting sound.  It sounds like catastrophic component failure.

Push until it burns.  Burn until it kills you.  Groan.  Puke.  Repeat.

Then something happened to me.  Somewhere along the way, the unconscious impulse, like a mandate from God,  failed.  Work.  Booze.  Something got in the way.

Everything got in the way.

I don’t know where it failed.  I don’t know why.  It scares me.  Now, when I need it more than ever, the animal impulse that has driven me for fifteen years gave out.

I might as well have my nuts in a vice.

Then I loaded up my new pack.  Concrete and cast iron.  The weight carried so well that I felt like I could carry double the load.  I could have carried an engine block.  As I huffed past the local VFW, someone was pushing out a man in a wheelchair.  Legless.  The Vet nodded at me solemnly, and part of my soul collapsed.  I returned the gesture.  And I ran.

I double timed for miles, tracking between telephone poles.  Run and don’t look back.  Puke if you have to.  Puke and keep going . . .

I felt a welling of emotion that I haven’t felt in years.  A feeling like drowning.  Swim or die.

Friday night I hit the front door running.  I pushed the pace.  I knocked three quarters of a minute from my best time ever.  I set that time eight years ago.

Now I’m 30 seconds better than I need to be.  Half a minute slower than I could be.  A minute slower than I should be.  Where I’m going, they don’t believe in minimums.

“Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on . . .”

Surrender is not a Ranger word.