There is a particular kind of morning — you will know it if you have ever had one — when the world seems to have organized itself, quietly and with great cunning, for the sole purpose of annoying you. Today was such a morning. I left the house already vibrating at a slightly higher frequency than usual, the way a kettle does just before it screams, and somewhere in the back of my skull Limp Bizkit began helpfully cycling through “Break Stuff” on an endless loop, as if my subconscious were a jukebox stocked entirely by a furious teenager in 1999.

I should, in fairness, have gone for a run. Running is what I do with feelings I haven’t yet agreed to have. But I hadn’t caught up with my own mood yet — hadn’t been formally introduced to it — until I wandered outside and discovered that the garage door had stood wide open all night, an oversight so small and so blameless that it nevertheless struck me as a personal insult, possibly the worst thing to happen to anyone, anywhere, in recorded history.

Let the record show that I am not, strictly speaking, having a bad day. I suspect I am starting my period, which means I am experiencing a kind of generalized, low-grade fury at everything within range that has the audacity to move — cars, pedestrians, the wind. Every part of me would like to break something. Preferably something inanimate. Then go home and lie very still.

It also happens to be September 11th. Twenty-five years, now, since that morning — a fact that arrives with the particular vertigo of realizing a wound you assumed had closed is, in fact, still an active construction site. I was freshly installed at college that year, on my own for the first time, which is a vulnerable enough state of being without the added flourish of watching your country get attacked on live television. I lived, at the time, a stone’s throw from a tank manufacturing plant in western Ohio — the sort of detail that sounds like exaggeration but is merely geography — and for weeks afterward everyone eyed the mail with real suspicion, and you could not switch on a television without some fresh apocalyptic footage burning itself directly onto your retinas. It was chaos, unfiltered and total, and I don’t believe I have ever entirely put it back together.

Maybe that makes me a baby. Maybe this blog’s title has been quietly diagnosing me all along, and I am, in fact, someone who runs from things — who has always run from things, only without the courtesy of telling myself so. Maybe I need to run more. Faster. Harder. Maybe I simply don’t run enough, and this whole exercise is my body’s way of billing me for the debt.

Either way, I have got to get out of here.