This is not the summer of my imagination.

Instead, this is the summer of writing, walking, and waiting.

Making it to the point where I can embrace these particular W’s is, perhaps, one of the hardest things I’ve done in the years that include a global pandemic. The inability to fully enjoy our new environment and its plethora of trails, views, and inclines, has been, shall we say, disappointing.

All this seems very dramatic and I am not, as a rule, especially theatrical. But I do not exaggerate when saying that this unexpected season is, frankly, soul-shattering. Having regulated my mental health through movement for the last three decades should have given me a clue that a lack of such thing might be dodgy. Said clue has been unforthcoming until the last twenty four hours.

I’ve wanted to live in the mountains since I was nine years old and my family took me to the Rocky Mountains. It has been a siren call ever since. Now I’m here, and I can do none of the things that I moved here to do.

The realization that the W’s are what is to be for this first few months, this time of revelation and learning and comfort in the cradle of the mountains, was taken in painful, stabbing parts. There was the little chit-chat I had with myself on the paved, flat trail - the only activity I am allowed to do. Interspersed with silent crying, loud sobbing, and the frightening of passers-by. There were days when I was sullen with the very therapists trying to wrestle my leg back into submission. Some days pulling back the covers was weighty with expectations I knew would never be fulfilled.

What’s one summer compared to a life of waiting? Logically, not much. But the urgency to explore every inch of this new, beautiful place is a thumb on my forehead. I almost can’t look out the window. I have to avert my eyes from the dozens of cyclists on the trails and the runners that woke up this morning to a day of perfect conditions to pound the dirt for a few hours. I am supposed to be one of them. I’m viciously jealous and achingly sad. I should be grateful for what I can do but it’s harder to make it there than it would be to summit any of those peaks.

So, there has been the return of old habits. They slipped into my ear whispering Parseltongue that if I could only eat this, drink that, stop wasting time, handle this with grace, be someone different, that this would all be better. It is easier to believe that voice and do the things that will make me feel better in the next few minutes than it is to face the unknown date when I might be healed. Pushing back against the siren song is not the way I want to spend my hours.

But there is no choice. The mountains are not going anywhere. Neither am I, I hope. Maybe when I let go is when the inflammation will start to wind down. In the meantime, it will be all W’s.

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