The Windrunner

You step off a plane, third city this week, and your phone lights with thirteen unread before you're out of the terminal. In the cab the driver asks hotel or office and you freeze a second and a half, because you have to work out which city today is. Then you open LinkedIn and message someone whose post you saw thirty minutes ago: I saw you left Company X last week, your next move's going to be interesting, give me ten minutes. They'll start a company with you in four months. You don't know that yet. You only caught the scent. You run two or three times faster than the people around you, racing not the hours but the eighteen-month window you're terrified of missing. A waxing gibbous skims fast across the sky. Hu-shi, the bow drawn in the stars for a thousand years, aches the instant it's full, because all the arrow wants is to leave the string. You're that arrow. Some windows stay open longer than you fear. Breathe at one of them.