“run”
dear jess —
today, i did something that i never thought i wanted to or even could dream of doing (not that it would have been a dream, per se). let’s start back a bit.
when i moved back to london in march, i was unemployed for a while. from march to june, i did bits of freelancing, but i mostly sat on the couch looking at job postings & moaning about money. when i finally got even an interview, i was really eager to earn some money & get out of the house. unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly the dream job i’d wanted, & i came home from work to sit on the couch, look at job posting & moan about my boss.
this seemed to be counterproductive to healing & thinking about you. in august, when i had money to pay for groceries & rent & beer (of course), i joined the gym across the street from my office. down a little side street (& conveniently located near a pub), it was dingy, rundown & perfect. i’d spend my lunch hour on the cross-trainer, working out my frustrations & putuponnesses about my job. sometimes i’d do it unable to see, leaving my glasses in my locker when i had itchy eyes, all the while hoping none of the muscle men lifting copious weights would think i was staring at them in the mirror.
i did this every week day until i got bored.
the treadmills were in front of the ellipticals. you know i hate running. even though i loved swimming, i wouldn’t join lee swim team for a while because they had to run (this doesn’t explain the stint of basketball my freshman year, i realise). but what else was i meant to do? sit at my desk & eat lunch & hope that i wouldn’t one day explode at someone’s incompetence & get fired, only to be back on the couch? i downloaded a program on my iphone, downloaded the harry potter books, took off my glasses & put the fan on high.
it wasn’t easy. there was a lot of grimacing. there was a lot of hurt knees & a very red face. but it cleared my head. at christmas, dad took me to metro run walk & bought me running shoes (he bought himself some too & left the store in them). i think mom thought i was a little nuts.
in february, i found out about the BUPA London 10,000, a 10-kilometre run through central London. i’d recently contacted the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in the UK to get some details about another charity event. i signed up that week.
in march, i did the sport relief mile, which was a 5K run. it hurt. i had a long way to go before i could do 10K. i ran outside, i ran to work & from work. i did more in the gym. i stopped drinking as much beer. i bought running shorts. i wore dresses outside.
yesterday afternoon, i was putting my stuff in my bag for the next day & it occurred to me that i did not want to be doing this. not because i thought it was worthless, not because it hurt, not because i still hate running. i just didn’t want to have this reason to be doing something like this. i didn’t want to be running to support a charity that could help other kids find a cure or at least more relief to type-1 diabetes. i didn’t want to be running with your name on my back. i wanted to be my fatter, unhealthier self a million times over if it meant you were still here.
it occurred to me that you got lost in this too. when i started out, i wanted to do something to remember you, to make something good, to help people with diabetes & maybe to, in some small way, save someone from the shit you had to deal with, the way things ended. but while i was doing that, i ended up thinking more about me. i didn’t mean to. my feeling thinner, my feeling better, my feeling stronger — it kind of got in the way.
running through the city, i nearly passed st paul’s cathedral. we went there. this was one of the purest moments of your trip to visit me. we just stood there. no one said anything about what he’d done on his last trip to london. we just looked. i was down the street, wishing my friend well on her move back to new york, on the night you died. on the run, i pulled the brim of dad’s navy hat down a bit further, realising only as we turned that the course diverted away from those places.
the day was grey & still. the wind was calmer than the previous day. all of my muscles — save my knees, always the knees in our family! — were in gear & in motion. i felt good. this last month has felt good, like i’ve allowed myself to commit to not just running, but to moving away from & standing up against negativity, to enjoying my strengths & to giving myself permission to be strong & okay. i crossed the finish line & walked for a bit & then jumped up & down like we’d do before the start of a swimming race, shaking it out.
i hope you don’t mind that i did this for both of us. i hope you wouldn’t think that i was running away from you, but maybe running towards something else.
i love you,
your big sis
