A girl is coming down a flight of stairs. The passage is narrow and twists back on itself, but she takes each step slowly, her boots meeting each tread with a thud, as though every descent is also a claim of identity. The flagstone beneath her is slashed by long strips of light, and the scuffed leather of her boots tells of roads no one else dared to take. Her hand, resting on the latch of the door to the stairs, steadies her—but only for a moment. Where most would hesitate, she advances.
The scent here is mixed: woodsmoke, polish, indefinably old, a trace of wattled dwellings of her ilk. Yet she is not of their ilk. This house whistles with draughts and eddies of air, with the tapping and hammering of tools, the sound of those who once tried to build permanence. But not today. The tools idle, the doors bolted tight. Mediocrity lives in the bolted spaces of others; she was born to unbolt her own.
At the bottom she stumbles; the pain in her knees sharpens, twinges, then fades again. Where others would call it failure, she names it fuel. She throws a quick glance over her shoulder, to make sure nobody is there, then steps inside. She opens her mouth and calls the names, one by one, of those who shaped her: her mother, her father, her teachers, her companions. Calling for the people who had fed her, swaddled her, rocked her to sleep, taught her to take her first steps, to blow on broth before she ate, to take care crossing the street, to stay away from deep water. All of it is a kernel, a hub, an epicentre: from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.
Outside, the roar of an idling engine mocks her. Others gawk at her and sneer, Have you nothing better to do than loiter there catching flies? They do not understand. They want triumph without sweat, reward without effort, a life without scars. They do not run—they drift.
But she? Her mind is quick, sharp as the reckoning in a ledger. Recalling verbs, tenses, rhetoric, numbers, calculations—her wit absorbs it all. More than twice she has been told to stop, to lose track, to and fro. But she cannot. Carefully, carefully, padded by scars, she moves forward.
To be a Runner is to choose effort over ease, clarity over illusion, to live one’s life and not the counterfeit of another.. To heave through obstacles, utterly confounded yet never broken. To lose without shame, for she does not cheat, to lose honestly rather than win falsely. To win only by effort, at a stroke, against all odds.
The Runner endures. And endurance is victory.
Every life has its kernel. Hers is running. And for that, she will always endure.
@Yolanda Muriel 
yolandamuriel.com 