The Lone Swordbearer

There's a notebook in your gym locker, blank on the cover, eighteen months of pace and heart rate packed inside, one corner folded down over a date and a finish time nobody knows. At dinner you mostly listen, nodding in the right places, while inside you're counting how long until you can make the nine o'clock run. You've cut your life clean in two, the half with people and the half with the goal, and the second half is the one you actually live in. Sixty percent odds and you stay still; eighty-five and you're already on the road and no one can pull you off it. Hit a wall, you go home and rewrite the table. Break through, you set one check on the page and turn it. Sirius is the brightest star in the whole sky, with no bright star beside it for company. A waning crescent is the moon already heading back toward dark. Worth asking, once, who you'd let walk even a few steps of that road with you.