I Also Love Ecstasy

First things first: a new Year-Long Novel Generator will start Wednesday, September 16 and run the full calendar year. Applications are due August 20. Please reach out for info; please tell your friends! Application info here.

Now, watch Harry talk about his time away from music; how he started jogging, loves the runner’s high, and then, he says, “I also love ecstasy”:

Now, a little about not-running:

The first time I quit, I was sixteen. Senior year of high school. I quit so many things. Cause and effect remain hazy, no clear timeline, but there’s an image, an early morning. There was a race. I overslept. My parents were out of town. It’s likely I was out and drunk the night before.

(And here, to say, drinking and running: the problem with being a weird scrawny kid who runs fast is that you still have to be a weird scrawny kid who has to be a person most of the time; that can feel sometimes more difficult when you also know how it feels to run fast and not feel weird or scrawny for a while; so then, maybe, weird-scrawny-kid-invited-to-a-party-maybe-only-because-you-run-fast, when you get offered a drink and then three more you feel less weird; you weigh 97 pounds, and you blackout and that feels less good but still better than whatever you are when you can’t run and have to be instead).

So then, that morning, having overslept: My siblings and I were staying with our grandparents. No alarm went off. Frantic, bleary, and hungover, I threw on clothes, grabbed a bag, drove quickly to the school. Two straight lines from my grandparents’ to the high school. I had a little black Volkswagen convertible, always drove at least 60 mph in what were all 35s. My best friend, favorite place, through the second half of high school, was that car. I often woke up in the morning, got dressed like my siblings, had breakfast with them, packed my backpack like they packed their backpacks; my little sister was a sophomore so I took her to school; but I’d drop her there then drive out of the parking lot, spend the whole day, top down and getting sunburnt, reading, parked at the beach, driving around.

My favorite day then was a six-hour drive down to the Keys, over bridges with water so blue it felt made up, so blue I had to work hard not to look too long because I’d fail to focus on the road. I’d park on the side of US-1, which, in the Keys often means water on both sides, and then I’d run an hour, two, swim, drive north again.

My parents worked a lot. There were cell phones, but this was when the school still called the house. They’d leave a message on our home machine that I’d delete. I was often strangely sunburnt for a kid who’d spent a day at school, but it was Florida. We were sunburnt almost all the time. Of course, I eventually got caught, but that’s not what I’m writing about here.

My car was the only place I liked. I drank and ran. Junior and then Senior year I ran a handful of races a little drunk still from the night before and still won some. Threw up in bushes, stunk of rum as much as sweat. That morning, stinking still, I sped to the high school, hoping to catch the bus before it left. The bus was often parked by the track behind the school. Turns out, they put a gate up in the parking lot to separate the back and front of school at night.

45-50 mph, I sped my little car until—shit—a gate. I flinched then turned the wheel right hard. Top down, and no seatbelt, the car flew over the curb, spelunked onto the grass and then a whirring noise and two flat tires. I tried to start the car again, but it just sputtered, spit. I must then have called my grandpa who sold cars.

I didn’t quit immediately after the morning that I almost crashed my car—I crashed that car, beloved friend, three more times that year—but that is what running up until then had come to feel like: waking up and rushing and then almost crashing and then stopping. Reckless, desperate, and not thinking, hungover, then a gate, and then a swerve, and then spelunk.

I had begun to see I wasn’t as fast as I hoped I could be. I had begun to resent the fact that people at parties often referred to me as runner girl. It was a relief, of course, to be referred to at all and in ways that weren’t overtly mean, dismissive, or attacking. I was scared of everyone and thing and interaction then. As I drank more, won less, the various threads of being in the world felt too elusive to keep hold of, I despised the ways that this one thing that had always felt like power didn’t feel like power anymore.

I still went to meets and lost more. The people in my life who used to come and look so proud, sometimes now left early out of shame. There were other factors. Most of which I don’t want to talk about. What felt strange—I was very angry—was that this thing that felt so good for what was really only a couple years, but a couple years then was a large portion of my life, felt bad now, and this made me very sad.

I’d been fielding calls from college coaches, but they stopped and no one talked about it. I’d been edging my way closer to the top of the state rankings then fell off. I started to skip meets and then was skipping so much school I didn’t even know if there were meets and so it felt less like skipping, more like exiting my life completely, hoping that I might somehow feel better if I could just be absent from everything and all the time.

The summer after senior year, I ran again. I would quit and start another handful of times in the next few years. I had a job at a Dude Ranch in Wyoming for the summer. Unsure how or who to be, I fell back into runner because I remembered vaguely that I’d liked being that.

I got up early in the morning. Anyone who cared or thought about how fast I might be wasn’t there and so I ran on mountains, mesas, watched the sunrise. I didn’t wear a watch or know how far I ran and it felt great. I worked with a guy who ran for Northwestern. I’d gone on a recruiting trip to Northwestern before the coaches had stopped calling and we’d met briefly on that trip, and he said maybe we could do our longer runs together and I said why not.

I didn’t tell him that I wasn’t going to run in college. I liked the way he talked like we had this thing in common. I liked the way it felt, when boys who didn’t talk to me in other settings, showed this quiet respect for the fact that I was fast. We worked six days a week but not on Sundays. We did our long runs then. We came to call them our Adventure Runs, because so often we got lost.

My favorite day we got somehow turned around and happened upon a field of downed trees, that for reasons having almost wholly to do with the fact that we were both still teenaged, we decided to climb over them instead of turn around. These runs were sometimes two hours and sometimes seven. We walked and hiked and climbed and swam and this day we came back bloodied from the errant branches as we climbed over those trees. We came back spent and sweating. We came back starving, sunburnt. I hadn’t even known running could feel like that.

The rest of the week we weren’t friends and we didn’t keep in touch. I can’t remember what we talked about or if we talked at all. We adventured and then we came back and were people. I was still so bad at being person, still got close to blackout drunk most nights. But those hours, understanding running as the same sort of space my car had been, private, sacred, separate, I got to fall in love with it for what was maybe the first time.

I got to see how what I’d loved before was winning, but how winning was a thing that could be taken from me, that I could lose at any minute, while this other thing that we did out there getting tore up, sweating, swimming, climbing, was just body and much better, a different separate type of power that I might get to keep.