Running with the Bull

The app on my iPhone showed I'd been running for forty-three minutes, but it felt like forty-three years. My breath came in ragged gasps, misting in the predawn chill. I stopped at the edge of the reservoir, hands on knees, while the water stretched before me like dark glass.

Then I saw it.

A bull stood fifty yards away, massive and still, watching me through the fog. Not the metaphorical kind—the bullish market projections I'd been dissecting for clients, the bullish optimism I'd been faking for months. This was flesh and bone and muscle, a creature that had no use for spreadsheets or quarterly targets.

My iPhone buzzed in my pocket. Probably Sarah, wondering where I'd disappeared to after leaving our bed at 3 AM. Probably work. Probably something that could wait.

The bull took a step toward me, and I didn't run. I should have—rational minds don't stand their ground against two thousand pounds of animal in the mist. But something in me recognized the posture. The stillness. The absolute conviction of its own presence.

"What are you doing out here?" I whispered.

The bull dipped its head to drink, and the water rippled outward in perfect concentric circles, disrupting the mirror surface. The sound was so ordinary, so profoundly simple, that it nearly broke me.

I hadn't cried since my father's funeral. Now, staring at this improbable creature while my iPhone continued its silent notifications, I felt something cracking open inside me like a dam I'd built thirty years ago and forgotten was there.

The bull finished drinking and looked at me again, eyes dark and ancient, before turning back toward the hills. I watched it go, standing there until my legs stopped shaking, until the sun burned away the mist, until I finally understood that some things—grief, love, the simple fact of being alive—couldn't be analyzed or optimized or fixed.

They could only be felt.

I pulled out my iPhone. Deleted seventeen unread emails. Then I called Sarah and told her I was coming home.