Watching 1 Mile To You. High school boy, runner. Loses his entire team in a bus accident. Girlfriend and friend, too. Runs to remember them. The faster he runs, the more he sees them. Remembers them. He doesn’t want to forget them.
His new coach asks:
What do you want? Your heart. The most important muscle in your body. Never rests. It remembers everything. I need your mind to know it. Your heart to know it.
He can look at pictures of his dead friend. Dead girlfriend. Text them. Watch video messages, see their smiles. And he remembers them.
He grieves.
But how do you grieve yourself? How do you grieve the reading slaughtered in the injury? How do you talk about lost reading like you talk about a dead girlfriend? Girlfriends who are gone don’t return distorted, damaged, done in. How do you grieve something you can’t look at, touch, watch, talk to, is a distorted, damaged, unfamiliar version of itself inside yourself? Not outside yourself. How do you grieve when you don’t want to remember yourself reading when it hurts so much? Yet the memory comes, and you remember you always saw yourself so long into the future holding a book, absorbed, silently slipping the pages over, one by one, living, breathing inside the story. You bang and bang on the doors of people to help you. To go back to that time when reading was just there and the future was certain. But no one can help though they try inside their own way.
It’s not coming back. You’re not coming back.
And then the expert calls it depression. Not grief.
