Why do I run? I will admit by the second mile I am wondering, ‘why the hell did I sign up for this? I feel miserable, it’s too hot/cold, I’ll never finish!’ I create a multitude of excuses of why I should not have, and never should again, run a 5K race.

But then I finish, and I feel overwhelmingly happy and joyous. I feel like I could do a marathon. A triathlon. Hell, Ironman. That’s how wonderful I feel when I cross the finish line.

And, of course, there is a certain amount of competitiveness I feel. And I will freely admit I am sometimes angry when I feel I have a bad time, angry when I don’t place well enough, even when I am reassured by my father I did fine.

But, today, during my first race since June, I felt like there was a deeper reason for why I run. Not to lose weight. Not to exercise. Not to win a medal. I do it for my family.

I’ve taken to wearing my great-Onkel Bernhardt’s T-shirt from the Mount Washington race (4,650 feet, average grade of 11.5%, the last 50 yards at 22%- at least, that’s what the website and the back of the shirt tells me) , which he has competed in numerous times and won twice. He gave it to my papa, telling him it should go to “the runner in the family”. Apparently, that person is me.

And when I run, I so often think of my family. I’m not sure why. Usually, it’s my fathers’ side- the Bavarian side, the hard-working immigrants, the soldiers. I find comfort in both sides of my family, but it is this German side that I relate to most.

I’m always bemoaning about that last mile or so, that stretch to the end. But then I remember, you have to finish this. 

I have to finish it for my great Onkel Tony- the ‘Nam veteran who still suffers nightmares. I have to finish for my papa- the blacksmiths’ apprentice, the coal miner, the one who nearly made it to the Olympics, the one who wrestled with Rocky Aoki, the toughest man I have ever met. I have to finish for my grandma- the toughest woman, the sweetest woman, always smiling and helping me with my Deutsch. I have to finish for all those aunts and uncles and cousins I met and may never meet again, the ones who will die or have died or will never again make it to America.

I have to finish for my great Onkel Berndt- whose voice in my head is only imagined as he assures me I can finish, that it’s only a couple more minutes of pain; the voice I can only imagine, because I will never get to meet him: cancer is just too cruel a thing.

So I guess this is why I run. Of course I want to stay active and strong. Of course it would be nice to get a medal or recognition. But it’s better, for me, to think of those who mean so damn much to me. Those that helped shape my upbringing, my attitude, my thoughts, those people who make me so proud to be German.

She is stoic, never to move again. The knobs of her spine are raised as if small, smooth rocks, rather than bones, lie beneath her skin. She is in the middle of lifting a bucket, her arms straight like the papyrus reeds that surround her. The nose is gone, erased, its existence marked only by bumps and indentations. What thoughts may be stuck in her marbled mind, never to move or set course through her veins? The front of her dress droops, the sleeves sliding down the smooth white shoulders. The skirt, wrapping and winding around her lithe legs, floats on the edge of the rock, anticipating its plummet into the water. She seems to hover despite the bare heels and toes clinging solidly to earth. 

I shall run away to Europe and I will live in a little cottage with a big garden that I have a gardener care for because I am terrible at tending to plants.

And I will have a large library full of books. Russian books and English books and German books and French books, Portuguese and Spanish and Persian and Chinese and Japanese and Italian and American and Egyptian. 

There will be a wooden gate at the front, with vines climbing up it so the house is obscured. There will be a statue as you walk down the path, a statue resembling Il Commendatore, yet wholly original. 

There will always be coffee and macarons at my house. 

I will be a video artist. 

I will be a journalist.

I will write screenplays.

I will travel the world. 

Even though I will have this cottage in the middle of Vienna-Salzburg-Munich-Hamburg-Paris-Lourdes-Florence, I will roam Europe. I will comb the Middle East. I will seek Asia and Africa.

I will not be defined by a college certificate.

You have no identity. Another nameless dahlia.

Your beloved little hill ignores the garbage, the ditch that awaits just below.

“We work, we build, we sweat, and from it we grow.” Growing up means not looking back down. Sickly weeds thrive, hiding low in the dying grass, but nobody notices. “Why think of the bad,” they say, “when we have so much to look forward to?”

Flowers do not have voices. Everybody knows that. No one has reason to listen to them; they have a thankless job, really, with pollination and spreading seeds and all those complicated steps that help the hill to become beautiful and important and thriving. Indeed, your job is thankless. The trees spit at you when you sway in the wind, the birds gossip about you behind your back. The bees look at you funny, and you aren’t so sure you like their gaze. 

People like the hill. They like to walk around in their dirty old sandals, taking pictures with Nikons before they see the weeds and anxiously shuffle away, muttering “thanks but no thanks” as they depart for another hill just down the way. The trees and birds and the other animals that come around scratch their heads in confusion as to why they leave so quickly.

You and your friends know, however. At night, you shy away from the weeds. But you dare say nothing, because the spit on your stem and the unsettling stares are enough already.

When one of the dahlias- still pink with youth-went missing in the fall, worry fluttered through the hill. But the weeds whispered in their oily voices, “It’s all right, she ran away, she won’t be missed. Find another dahlia to do the work.”

You are afraid you will be next. 

 “Imagination is more important than information.” So goes a thought of Robert Fulghum in his article A Bag of Possibles and other Matters of the Mind. It’s an interesting thought, striking in how he is placing one concept above another. And in today’s world, we seem to revere information- polls, statistics, photographic proof, written proof, historical facts- as a determining factor in all. That is something I have always disagreed with, however, and quite honestly I find it quite refreshing to see an opinion of mine mirrored in the journal of another.

            I love imagination. It’s a strange word in and of itself, in my opinion. Merriam-Webster tells me it is the “act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly received in reality” (this definition is information, right there). But I think imagination is much deeper than what the internet or a book full of definitions tells me. Imagination is this strange ability to treat things differently; “things” isn’t physical, though, and nor is it mental. It can be either or it can be both. It doesn’t have to be confined to an image- it may be words, music, a concept, or something deeper and further than that. Imagination helps us create. Imagination has layers to it, culminating in what I believe is deep and dark and yet to be discovered, this strange part of us that we have yet to explore, but when we finally find that part, it’s absolute magic. Yes, magic; it’s our masterpiece, really. It is our Two Fridas or Garden of Earthly Delights. It is our part of the imagination that builds and builds, perhaps taking even years to develop before we really realize what it is. Information is available to us in an instant; imagination takes work, dammit, and it’s not something you can just sit down and pull from Merriam-Webster. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Vermeer didn’t use paint-by-numbers to create A View of Delft. Imagination takes time.

Information…We live in the Information Age. Information: polls and graphs, dictionaries and maps and encyclopedias, complex mathematical equations that ask you what X is and what Y is and how they are related. We get our information from computers, from newspapers, from outdated books and shiny new books. Of course, imagination and information may cross paths. We have maps with exquisite, tiny details of sea monsters and ships and exotic people and animals. But this is all old…our world today is fast and we want it all now, we don’t want to wait months for a map to come out just because some guy is squinting by the light of a candle trying to draw Nessie. I’m not totally dissing information, and I can’t deny its importance and relevance in our world. 

Imagination is something I use constantly, as is information. I have a hard time saying one trumps the other, to be honest; and at the same time I fear that our age of scientific facts and historical facts and high-speed computers and cell phones and iPods and iBooks and iWhatever is starting to overcome our imagination. Personally, I’ve heard too many “that can’t happen in real life” comments regarding movies in the past couple of years. Of course it can’t happen in real life, that’s the point! Isn’t that why we watch movies, to escape? So why should it matter if it can’t happen in real life? We are supposed to suspend those beliefs when we watch films or read a book. It’s part of the imagination, suspending those doubts and allowing your mind to go somewhere else completely. 

Without imagination…without imagination, would I be spending my Sunday afternoons reading novels, short stories, poetry? Hell no. Writing these stories and poems requires creativity on the part of the author, willingness to go along on the adventure and contribute my own thoughts and ideas is needed while I read. Of course I could spend those hours reading books full of important information, but that isn’t nearly as fun as letting my mind take sail. Imagination is freedom. Imagination is letting your mind sail all over the Earth and even further than that. Imagination is important to children, to students, to mankind. Without it, I’d have to call into question where any of human’s passion was. Or would we even know passion if imagination never even existed?

Without imagination I wouldn’t be able to write this paper. This paper would be full of facts and put you to sleep. 

To be quite frank, I am sick of facts. To be honest, I want to let my mind travel and wander all over the place. To be forthright, I want to explore those different layers of my imagination. To be plain…if I could, I would write stories every day.

I’d bury a room full of stories and drawings and poems. I would take how I see the world and warp it, make it something different and beautiful but still painful and sad. If I may be a little arrogant, I love my imagination and I’m glad it is not as common as facts. I am glad it’s mine and that it’s full of all these little strange pockets and characters and things that no one else is thinking of. I am proud of my imagination in all its layers, even those deep dark ones I’m still working on finding. Fulghum was right when he says imagination is important. Without it, we would be these sad lost shadows walking around, asking each other about passion and how to find it, wondering if there’s more to us than what we are fed by technology.

The beggar was afraid of art. Music, of course, is its own form of art. But there was, in his mind, a difference between the words that arose from his voice and the paintings and graffiti that hung within museums and along the walls of the city alike. Music could not face him with piercing eyes that seemed to judge his faults and his past involvement in brutal war, the symbolic representations too obscure for him. Music had no eyes to watch him with. All he had to do was remember words, and he was quite all right, thank you very much.

Truthfully, he never thought of the songs the way others thought of art. He did not contemplate their meanings and hidden images; he was not a scholar or an art student with a bloated head, babbling on and on about what the artist meant, what a silly line made with pencil was supposed to show.

He simply sang.

Once, a man had set up an easel across the street and started sketching, his young hand carefully moving along the paper, just as a boat lazily drifts across a river. There was no reason for this tentative artist to work quickly. But it had made the beggar uncomfortable. He had licked his chapped lips, not yet cracked and bleeding from winter, and glanced shiftily up and down the street. Should he berate the boy?

There wasn’t much else around him, aside from the cafe, which was purely boring and empty of people. He had to be drawing the beggar, as if he were some sort of statue without feelings or a mind of his own! He made up his mind- march across the street and demand he stop his absurd drawing, his irritating sketches that he had no business in creating.

The young man had glanced up as the beggar loomed over him, his pencil hovering over a light line on the upper corner of the page. He smiled shyly and spread his hand in front of the paper. “Excuse me, Herr, I couldn’t help myself.” his German was clumsy and slow- a foreigner.

“But of course,” the beggar had responded gruffly. “Though here in Bonn we revere courtesy, don’t you think you could have simply asked your subject if he’d like to be drawn?”

He blinked stupidly, glancing between the page and the beggar. “But that defeats the point!” he said indignantly. “Art is about observing, and-“

“Don’t babble to me about your art,” he sighed, “it would be good enough if you stopped, or at least made it less obvious!”

The young man grumbled under his breath, shoving the pencil into his pocket and picking up his things. “So rude, and they told me you were a landmark of sorts!” he had snorted. The beggar had watched his retreating back, his mouth open. A landmark? He was no sculpture or piece of architecture! He was no piece of art himself! He shook his head, turning on his heel to return to his spot outside the cafe.

Please note my teacher’s name isn’t really Mr. Peinture. But that would be awesome if it was.

“Be yourself!” It’s one of those posters that we have been seeing attached to our classroom walls since kindergarten, multicolored letters blaring at us and searing its message into our young eyes. So of course we are always muttering this little phrase under our breath when we walk into school, allowing the two simple words to lurk somewhere in the recesses of our minds. But then, when we think of being ourselves, we immediately connect it with allowing everyone to know the details of ourselves, of our lives- and slowly you lose yourself. I’ve been dwelling on these thoughts often in the past weeks and have yet to come to a complete conclusion; however, I think I am on the right track to finding a balance.

In fact, my epiphany-if that is what you want to call it-happened quite recently. Actually, it was within the first three days of school. “I like being indefinable,” my new A.P. Art History teacher, the legendary Mr. Peinture, had quipped. He had gone off on an interesting thought (as Mr. Peinture is much too soft-spoken for even the word that is rant) regarding how we stereotype others and ourselves. He went on to say he would never want to fit into one niche or for us to understand him. Likewise, he wouldn’t want to completely understand us, to completely know who we are. The circumstances of how he got onto this topic do not matter to me: it is more his words that resonated.

For the past two weeks or so, these four words have churned over and over in my mind, sometimes at the very forefront of my thoughts while at other times hidden deep under a mountain of Pre-Calculus and German.  Indefinable? What does that mean? Why is it important?  What about being myself- doesn’t that mean allowing others to see every part of me?

I suppose what I mean is rather complicated. Throughout middle school, I always associated “Be Yourself” with opening up to others completely. I was (and still admittedly am) an introvert, and back then I had no clue who I was. I couldn’t figure out what being myself meant, so I wrongly thought that I should act like the other girls I went to school with. They knew who they were, so maybe I could find out who the real Aley was through them. How wrong I was! I may have gone to school with these other girls, but I hardly knew them; how could I know myself?

But indefinable…indefinable is so broad, so mysterious, so incomplete. We humans do not like the mysterious and incomplete. Rather, we like things laid and spelled out for us so we may understand everything. We have labels for everything, from “Crayons” to “Ophiophagus hannah”, telling us precisely what a subject is and thus how we should treat it. And it’s certainly the same way in school (hello, nearly everyone from our parents to the film industry equates high school with stereotypes- like, duh!): she is an athlete because she is in five sports and always wears Nike, he is a band geek because he plays the trumpet, they’re all a bunch of stuck-up know-it-alls because they get the best grades. Therefore, we ourselves feel this need to know who we are, what are purpose is in life. We try to show ourselves for who we are, and perhaps with this comes those stereotypes and cliches we attach to one another; we paste “Athlete” above a girl’s head because, maybe, that is the closest thing she associates with and understands. But is this really what we want for ourselves? Do we want to be understood so fully that we are labeled and placed on a shelf next to other Athletes and Musicians and Scientists?

Well, that was how I thought. If I was as artistic and smart and a little crazy as I felt I was on the inside, then I should bear all that on the outside too. That was the only way to connect to others, after all. And yet I could never actually accomplish this wish, for people to know me for who I was, or even for me to know myself. I am too shy of others, and sometimes I am even a little afraid of my own mind, my own soul and thoughts.

“I like being indefinable!” The room was giving off a mysterious air to me: the heavy curtains guarded us from the stark brightness of the next room’s windows, the faint yet ever-present scent of paint and pencil. Nothing was different about me. Nothing had changed in the way I crossed one leg casually over the other, balancing myself on a three-legged stool. I was physically still flame-haired and silent. Yet there was a small change; it was as if a little invisible part of my mentality had whooshed out to be replaced with a shiny, new piece, one to be cherished and explored.

What I mean by all this is, I no longer have this crazy desire to know Aley. And, to be quite blunt, I do not care if others know me or not. There are so many complex bits and pieces of me that I still have yet to explore that it is impossible that I should be pigeon-holed into even being an “interesting character”. Despite what society may say-be yourself, we want others to understand you clearly!-I think that I much prefer the idea of being a little mysterious. My soul and mind are completely different than even those I may closely associate with; our thought processes, however aligned, are strange and intricate and finely detailed to a point that there is no way we can truly completely match up. I do not want people to understand the way I came to a conclusion! I do not want my best friend to know why my favorite musician is Miss So-and-So or why the author I revere most is Mister What-You-Call-Him.

Of course I want to be myself. I want to be Aley, not anyone else. But that is exactly what I am- Aley, and even my name does not confirm who I am and who I am not. Furthermore, I don’t need to know who I am, and I don’t have to show everyone the deepest parts of me, those strange inner workings that make me this creature that I am. Because, if I show every piece of me and give it all away, what will be left?

The plain box opened with a loud tearing noise. He sighed and stared at it forlornly; the rip meant the cereal would go bad quickly, and he wasn’t sure he had the extra change to buy another box in two weeks rather than the usual four.

He needed money so he could take the bus; he was scrounging for a new pair of shoes; winter was coming, and his gloves had holes in them. Not to mention, the cereal needed milk, a bowl, and a spoon. He did not like to eat his cereal dry. It made his mouth feel funny. Even a storyteller like him could not explain the strange sensation of eating dry cereal. Perhaps because it was such an unexplainable sensation, something one must experience on their own to know fully. 

He poured a little into the styrofoam bowl, picked up the plastic spoon, and ate. As he did, his mind wandered back to the story he had woven earlier in the day. This was what he did with his life, traveling the streets relaying stories for the enjoyment of others. The pleasure, the delight on their faces sustained him. What was money? It left too quickly and brought little satisfaction. If anything, it brought despair.

“But what happened to the man?” a young girl had whined, tugging anxiously at her pigtail.

He had chuckled. “Hush, young one. Rest assured, he found his way back to Cairo. Having no shoes, his feet were burnt and aching, but love had sustained him…”

They had been entranced by this story of devoted love. He rarely told such stories, as he himself had never experienced the emotion. His stories were about murder, long-forgotten battles, revenge. Yet despite these morbid subjects, children were spellbound. Their mothers were too busy pretending not to listen, eyes glazing over receipts from the department stores, that they could not cover their sons’ and daughters’ little ears. Once, he had recited The Iliad by heart, astounding the modern men who held their Blackberrys in one hand, a bag full of designer ties in the other. 

“How can such a poor soul know all this? He must be barely literate,” one of them had mumbled to his wife in his deplorable German.

Women had asked him what his past was, the elderly had tried shoving a couple Euros into his hand. He would take only the smallest of donations, refusing both the stacks of tens as well as the inquiries. They had no right to know. He was merely a subject of sympathy and disgust; he did not want to give them more to frown over. He preferred their smiles, their thank-yous.

As he ate his cereal, he watched a child skip past him, eagerly licking an ice cream. Their eyes met for a moment before the little girl turned away, grinning and babbling about the Story Man.

Yes, that was what he was. He was not the beggar, even though by definition this was the only word that suited him. He was the Story Man, and he was quite fine with that.

I love to draw them. If my SLR was not broken I would photograph only them.

I love their elegance, I love their harshness. It’s incredible how you can see young, old lines in them. They are soft to hold. They are expressive and beautiful and imaginative. We use them to speak, to love, to comfort. We paint the nails, we henna the palms and put rings on the fingers. They are weathered and weary, tanned from hard work, dark and light and every shade in between. They are small and big and just beautiful.