The night sees me
I’ve taken to running recently at 10:00 at night. There’s something about running at night with no sun, no blaring music, no cars, and no people that creates bitter and beautiful stories in the darkness ahead of me. I hear the thumping of my sneakers on the pavement, the feeble scuff of my left toe on the pebbly surface, a slightly irregular twist of my affected knee that only doctors would scribble about on clipboards. But I hear it, even above the beating of blood in my ears and my own erratic breath. Damage is permanent. We never come back 100%.
I’m not as fit as I would like to be. Those days of rock solidness, of being intimately aware of every tendon and sinew in my body and the strength of every fiber compared to all others has passed. I was 17, then 23, then 26. Now I’m 30. I still feel it all there, just under my skin, but it’s as if it all needs to be abused less and encouraged more. At the half mile mark I feel the old familiar pit of pain, but higher, underneath my rib cage. I wind down reluctantly and jam my fingers up underneath my bones. The pain subsides. I start up again, ignoring the formation of new pangs. I can never stop for long. I don’t understand people who aren’t always running, always learning, always creating, always building. Even at rest, I need a purpose. No doubt they’ll never understand me either. We will co-exist in bewilderment.
Running at 10:00 while other people do 10:00 things clears the darkness of the trail ahead. It’s like going out for a hike in the middle of the day when everyone else is at work. I pass between people’s backyards, my shadow briefly flitting through the light of their back porches and family rooms. Are they watching TV? Are they asleep? Are they arguing? Are they in love? Are they lonely? I pass by the lives of people I’ll never know and people who will never know me, at 10:00 at night on a Tuesday.
Physical running makes emotional running seem real. I can run from my desk job, from my relationship, from my loneliness and anger. There’s no rut I can’t run out of when I put my shoes on and leave my house behind. I always run back, though. I’m not sure what it will take one day to keep me from turning around.
The trail is so dark it vanishes between the houses. My hands and face ache in the stinging March night. I turn the corner. Street lamps light the way back. I turn into my driveway with the speed bumps and open my stride toward home. I run as if a cheering crowd awaits me, yellow tape, fame and fortune. I leap up onto the sidewalk and slow to a jog. It’s silent except for the far off sounds of the highway. My breath comes out in white plumes and my fingers are numb. Inside, I am warm.
