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"Laurie, you're an angel! How shall I ever thank you?" "Fly at me again. I rather liked it", said Laurie, looking mischievous, a thing he had not done for a fortnight.
"DARK DAYS," LITTLE WOMEN Chapter XVIII .
"My dear Teddy, i miss you more than I can express. I used to think the worst fate was to be a wife, I was young and stupid. now I have changed. the worst fate is to live my life without you in it."
JO MARCH, LITTLE WOMEN.
Jo March had been born running.
It wasn’t a pretty metaphor or a poetic flourish to open a chapter; it was the plain truth. Since childhood she had run the way one breathes, barefoot, hair in permanent rebellion, heart always racing ahead of any sensible thought. Being still, for her, was a little like dying.
She ran because there was something inside her—fire, fury, faith? she never quite decided—that simply didn’t fit entirely within her body.
And, well, she also ran because she never learned to walk like a proper young lady, no matter how much Meg begged her.
The first times, she ran with him.
Laurie always followed a step behind—laughing, calling her, tripping over roots she dodged without looking—as if he had accepted that this untamable girl was a compass pointing to places he had yet to learn how to reach. They looked like two kites tied to the same string: she pulling shamelessly toward the sky, he holding on with a smile that seemed to exist for her alone.
Every race ended the same: grass tangled in her skirts, cheeks burning, heart tumbling recklessly, and that dangerous, aching sense of being on the verge—so close—to lifting off the ground.
The second time, she ran after him.
The carriage rolled downhill, taking with it the dust, her pride, and Laurie on his way to college. Jo had sworn she wouldn’t cry. And, of course, she wouldn’t run, wouldn’t do any of those embarrassing things the foolish heroines of bad novels always did.
But when distance began to swallow him whole, something inside her cracked. Her legs—traitorous, wise, far more honest than she—lunged forward before her mind could object.
She ran.
She ran until the air burned her lungs, until she reached the carriage and struck its wooden side with trembling fists. Laurie leaned out, startled. The carriage halted, and she hugged him without asking permission, thinking of nothing except not letting go. It was a wordless embrace; a leap into the void she barely admitted she had taken. For an instant, Jo felt her feet leave the earth.
Years later, when he dared to confess what he had kept silent for so long, Jo ran again.
But this time, away from him.
Laurie’s words were so sincere, so clear, so terrifyingly beautiful that they frightened her more than any war, sermon, or expectation. Jo didn’t know how to love “in that way.” Or so she insisted, as if repeating it aloud could make it true.
So she fled: first with her tongue—which was always a bad sign—with a flurry of excuses she herself didn’t believe; then with her feet.
She fled across the meadow while her heart, rudely, shouted the opposite.
And yet, the body has memory.
A very bad habit, if you asked Jo.
When the world hurt too much, when Beth fell ill, when the house emptied of laughter, when silence weighed heavier than books. Jo returned to the one thing she had known since she was an eight-year-old whirlwind: she ran.
Without destination, without dignity, without explanation. And, curiously (or perhaps not), she always ended up in Laurie’s arms. As if he were her north, her refuge, her point of departure and return… though she would never admit it in so many words.
And now, once again, she was running.
Laurie walked away down the path, his back rigid, his eyes still shining from the confession he’d watched shatter between them.
Jo felt the air snag in her throat. She couldn’t let him go. She couldn’t stay still. And she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—keep lying to herself.
So she ran.
She ran with all the strength of the years she had lost, with her soul burning at her heels, with tears tangling themselves in the wind.
She ran so fast the world blurred around her, as if she no longer touched the earth, as if each step launched her upward, closer to a sky she had never allowed herself to reach.
And when Laurie saw her approaching; hair lifting like a blaze, cheeks aflame, her heart overflowing in every ragged breath. Jo understood she wasn’t falling.
She was, at last, taking flight.
“I’m terrified of a domestic life,” she whispered, her voice trembling more than her knees, “but I’m even more terrified of a life without you.”
Laurie smiled with that tenderness that made her shake for the least decorous reasons.
The wind moved between them, raising dust and courage.
And when he answered by stealing her breath with a kiss—falling over her like an inevitable reply—for the first time Jo didn’t feel she was fleeing or chasing.
She felt she was flying.
Because she finally understood that running toward Laurie had always been her way of learning to take flight.