Sunrise Run

The alarm screamed at 5 AM like it had a personal vendetta against my REM cycle. Three hours of sleep. Again. Between AP Calc homework that refused to solve itself and my mom's third-shift schedule keeping our apartment awake, I was basically a zombie at this point.

Lacing up my running shoes, I caught my reflection in the hallway mirror—purple under-eyes like I'd gone ten rounds with a heavyweight boxer. "RIP to my mental health," I whispered, grabbing my phone.

Outside, the suburban streets were dead silent. Perfect. This was my time, my ritual, the one thing keeping me from completely losing it during the school day. Coach said if I wanted varsity letter by junior year, I needed to put in extra miles. But this wasn't about cross country anymore. It was about swimming through the noise in my head without drowning.

My legs protested at first—stiff, heavy, basically dragging themselves forward. But then rhythm took over. Thud-thud-thud against the pavement. My breath synced with my steps. In, out, in, out.

The sky started doing that thing where orange bleeds into purple like someone spilled watercolor across the horizon. Beautiful, actually. Not that I'd admit that to anyone. My friends would think I'd gone soft.

"Jackson's catching feelings about sunrises now," my best friend Marcus would say, making that face. "What is this, Tumblr?"

Whatever. Marcus wasn't the one running from panic attacks that hit random Tuesdays during third period.

I rounded the corner near the old quarry where kids partied on weekends. Even from here, I could see the orange Gatorade bottles scattered everywhere—shoutout to whoever invented pre-game anxiety.

That's when it hit me, like actually hit me: none of this was permanent. The sleep deprivation, the pressure, the feeling like I was swimming upstream while everyone else floated downstream. It all had an expiration date.

I picked up the pace. Fast. Faster. My lungs burned but my brain finally, finally cleared. For the first time all week, I wasn't thinking about college applications or whether my crush noticed me today or how I was gonna explain my C- in chem to my mom.

I was just running.

And yeah, maybe I'd be a zombie again by lunch period. But right now? With the orange sun finally breaking over the horizon and sweat dripping down my back and my legs somehow still moving?

I was alive.