The Bull With Familiar Eyes

I am running so fast my joints feel displaced. Sweat is soaking my pores like hot, thick candle wax. My heart feels like an angry prisoner trying to escape his cage. I must outrun him. I must. My feet keep sinking into the sopping wet mud with every step I take. I hear him grunting, breathing so loudly it’s waking all the jungle animals.

Just a moment ago, my thoughts were my friends. Now they are my enemies whispering the evilest things in my ears. “Just let ‘em get ya” “You haven’t got much longer”.

Bulls have one stomach with four chambers. He could digest my body like quicksand if he wanted. Does he want to? He’s a wild beast. He has to. But I thought I saw him smile the last time I looked back. His grizzly teeth were baring a familiar soul. As if someone I knew was trapped inside of him, hunting me down. Maybe one of my enemies.

I feel like a ghost running through this forest now. I don’t feel my feet stomping or my nostrils flaring up on every inhale. I do feel myself giving up. I feel myself giving in. I suppose this is how I must go. Crushed by an 1800 pound champion, then go I must.

I plop down in the mud and let my last memories wash over me. They sting my eyes like ocean water. An image of my mother holding my soft infant body claws at my eyelids. Then, a flood of middle school memories. Tonya puking on the Ferris wheel at Harbor’s Carnival, dad swatting flies in the kitchen, my mom turning into a fly, but dad never stopped swatting. “Those pesky things,” he said, “You’ll understand when you’re older.” Then, a blurry Kodak photo of someone taking me to prom in high school and nothing more. And now. Me. Soil devouring my flesh before this beast does. Marinating me for him.

The bull that only lives 25 years, the bull that will outlive me.

As I await the midnight of my soul, I realize that I’ve been waiting for a lifetime. Is my end supposed to be this dramatic? This cinematic that this bull can’t just take me in between his jaws already. All the hope that lived inside of me drains out. I have nothing more to lose.

So, I decide to turn over to face this monster eye to eye. Meet my death like the man my dad would have wanted me to be.

I slowly turn over as the mud feels like concrete now, and I don’t believe what I see. I expected a wet snout, hungry for blood, and the amber sunset illuminating starving eyes.

But instead, I see me. My own eyes are peering into my face, expressionless. His hand outstretched, his long black curls billowing in the wind. Me. An older me. The future me.

“Wanna stay in the mud forever?” He asks. “Back to your past? Stuck in your past. The mud…your past?”

“N-no,” I say weakly, ants rimming my lips where a mustache should be.

“Then stop running from me”, he says. The triceps and biceps and quadriceps, and abdominal muscles on him start to swell. He’s becoming more robust by the second. More bull-like. Resilient.

I am sitting now with my arms bent behind me, my knees up to the sky. So this is what re-birth looks like. A bull chasing you until you can’t run anymore. Until you have no choice but to accept fate and grow or stay stuck in the mud.

The bull that only lives 25 years. Until the next bull comes.

I wonder if I will try to outrun him again.