This Is Running for Your Life (39 page)

And I'd think:
Run
.

*   *   *

The road was home that summer. Something had to be. The in-betweenness of student living—generally little more than a sleeping arrangement—and the displacement of childhood bedrooms had sent the concept of home into its scheduled state of flux. Not expecting to have a job helped offset the heartache of not finding one: more time for the pavement. Every morning I ran by my old school and the adjacent church, cutting into the local park across the street and passing the deer and goats pacing their petting-zoo enclosures. A single, rogue peacock ever stalked the grounds, scaring children and uninitiated runners with his appalling, woman-in-peril call. In Springbank Park I'd find the Thames and its slacker patrols of Canada geese, following it downtown through to the north end, past the university. From there I turned east or west, depending on my mood, and took the big roads back.

My toenails were blackening and falling off as quickly as they grew in, and my period had stopped completely. As a way of escape, distance running is the sensory negative of sexual oblivion, the cosmic hiccup of swallowing and being swallowed at once. Ruled by a kind of bodily intuition, runners develop an animal awareness of their surroundings, twice a second deciding where the foot falls, trusting churning legs over uneven terrain, gauging the relative traction of four hundred kinds of ice, predicting the paths of three dozen moving bodies, sensing whether the inevitable car sneaking up behind will yield or try to force itself past at the moment of convergence. Only when I lost track of the passing minutes would time show itself every moment. On returning home I would stand in the kitchen where I used to bang pots on the floor, sweating and staring at the clock in disbelief.

The city was an open question I attempted to answer each day. Looking back, looking from above, all that running appears as a radically, almost pathetically physical solution to a metaphysical problem of homesickness, a search for the portal or spatial alignment that would release me back into the world, even as I pounded into my bones the idea that to get anywhere a person had to be alone.

At the time it felt more like obeying a survival instinct, that what kept me running was the future's scorch at my heels, the threat of engulfment from all sides. The present, with its finger puzzle of feminine identity, was only more untenable. Better to be nobody, maybe, just a streak on the road. Better to hide than to show the world your halfness.

In the safety of that suspension I could wait things out as a pure observer. Not that there was so much to take in, on the surface, anyway. My news of any given day shrank to civic esoterica: a roving micro-reporter on the morbid tip, I collected accidents, roadkill sightings, insect conflagrations, and sad tableaux, like that of a smattering of cars parked outside the liquor store at eight forty-five in the morning, their drivers counting down to the day's re-up. I'd devote weeks to exploring newly discovered cemeteries, collecting archaic or punny names, felicities of phrasing, a particularly staggered stone angel.

The sound track to this ecumenical smallness had a new supplier: a few weeks after our goodbye in Toronto, the first letter from Rafe arrived, and soon after that a cassette tape. Other than the polar force of his interest and a few fragments from our walks, my impression of Rafe from the previous year was smudgy: I had grown unused to regarding things—that is to say humans—in situations where they might regard me back. I tended to be surprised when people noticed or spoke to me—even a little disappointed—and narrowed focus until the moment passed. But letters, those folded emissaries of personality, could be pored over outside such pressures. They could be created, in other words, and create their readerly ideal. The tapes, with handcrafted covers and calligraphed track lists, were a blend of Wilco, Weezer, and Pavement, obscure neo-punk like the Queers, the Donnas, and the Muffs mixed in with their antecessors. Stuck between CDs and preteen tapes, I had been surviving on a diet of the Police and old Tom Petty from my brother's abandoned cassette collection; anything outside of nasal, blond eighties rock was a gift.

Rafe, who displayed a seismographic exuberance on the page, was still doing all the things I used to do: going to shows, goofing off with friends, pining after the unavailable. We felt far apart indeed, and so I did what any girl would to bridge the gap: I wrote to him. I answered every letter and eventually made tapes of my own, and in this way we passed the months, ferrying various selves back and forth, submitting ideals for approval and carrying home the blueprint for what the other preferred us to be. Which is to say we amused each other, greatly, and grew attached to our amusement. Over the following four years of correspondence I became the more attached by far, an attachment that manifested in the physical world, naturally, as near-total evasion.

*   *   *

At some point in my third year of university I sent my first e-mail—in reply to my first receipt of an e-mail, from Rafe. The keystroke-by-keystroke creation of an entire medium suited those just then pioneering their voices very well in that it concentrated mutual, epistolary invention into a full-blown phenomenon. Much advertised for its connective properties, e-mail was a godsend to a budding isolationist because it created the illusion of remaining in touch.

By then Rafe and I were also sessioning into the night on the telephone. We talked about old movies, new bands, our eccentric, ordinary families, and, after a late-summer confession about the extent of my habit, the status of my feet. A sometime runner himself, instead of raising an eyebrow over my running the better part of a marathon every day, Rafe extolled my discipline. I had given myself away, he said, by showing up to class one day in a pair of Sauconys—the sneaker of the serious. In fact I only wore Nike, and never to school. Even at the time, I noted the greater misapprehension—coming from the most curious, observant person I'd ever met—with a mixture of relief and disappointment. Another second hand was added to the master clock: How long before he finds me out, and this whole thing implodes?

So much of falling in love is a biographical project; we turn our stories over and hope for the best. Should you inspire the full-dress treatment, you will find yourself loved but also much altered. Rafe could have sent Boswell to his cups: if I let slip some uncomfortable family angst, he would clamor for more; if I mentioned the constant and repulsive shedding of my toenails, he'd leave a packet of customized press-ons at my doorstep; if I acted like a jackass he—and this really beat all—was quick to forgive. Especially if you haven't yet pieced together a workable self, to find yourself fully formed in someone else's imagination is irresistible the way Kryptonite is irresistible. When inhabiting her felt like cheating, I'd try to undermine this other me, but nothing—no weirdness, no open disabuse, not all the tasteless dildo jokes in the world—seemed to shake her hold. I'd never seen anything like it and worried, in lieu of precedent, that this kind of fascination amounted to a form of idolatry, or at least a profound self-distraction. It took years for the shadow my interlocutor was dodging—the sometime girlfriend he rarely mentioned, and then as a casual acquaintance—to emerge, and in the early months it hardly seemed to matter: we were pen pals, mostly; phone buddies, at best; e-mail—what? What even was e-mail?

Rafe was a kind of savant of the form; no one had told him it was too cold and impersonal for tone and feeling. His dispatches brimmed over with his personality, his wit and humor, his maximal syntax. Where I plodded along worried about spelling and spacing, seeking a reflection of the familiar, e-mail was just another way in which everything Rafe touched became a natural extension of him. I'm not sure I ever learned more from another writer. For him our daily correspondence comprised the vivid description of a life in progress, where I was trying to write myself into the world.

Both of Rafe's parents were high school teachers. This was his plan as well, and no postgraduate detours kept him from it. He headed straight into teachers college—in London, as expected, where I stood him up one evening that fall out of pure, nervous stupidity and he temporarily lost my number—and then to a placement in a Toronto high school. Among many other traits, I envied his certainty, the easiness he exuded toward all things except, increasingly, me. The relationship we had built from longing and fiber-optic lines was bulging in unsightly places. I pretended not to notice. Wasn't this the fun part, anyway? Wouldn't the dreary confines of adult romance put an end to playing around in our pretend world? Did we learn nothing from Master Hawks? Although constant, enigmatic communication suited the wearier half of us just fine, for Rafe the question of our future evolved into the crisis of discipline already familiar to me: Can a pursuit have meaning if it extends beyond choice? Is it devotion or just masochism to go on uncertainly?

I took a full-time job at a public-broadcasting network two months before graduation, vowing to maintain the running, to just peel back the days at the top and keep going. I began waking up before five, exploring the local parks, cemeteries, and reservoirs in the dark. To miss a day was to admit weakness, a system failure with ominously undefined ends. The appearance of supreme self-control belied the fact that I no longer had much say in the matter of what made me good or bad; there was only running or not running. As much joy as I still took in those long, lapidary, arch-ruining runs, my reliance on them was unsustainable: in fact I had lost control of my life, and I'd done it my way. The world was revealing a complexity that would not be mastered by discipline alone, and the thought of having to battle my way back into it every single morning of my life basically made me want to die.

*   *   *

The previous winter I had published my first piece of writing, nine hundred words on my relationship with running. I had thought it was about toughness and solitude; the editor titled it “An Addict Confesses.”

If you were searching for clues about how to tell a story in 1998, that noun/verb axis was the first and biggest to be found. The way to tell a story was to reveal the weird or painful thing that made you special. Your liberation would liberate the reader, and together you could bask in a kind of empathic synergy. Confession was a narrative form whose only sin was holding any part of yourself back; it developed its own house style and sense of what it meant to be good (relatable), to be moving (vulnerable), to tell the truth (to tell all). But like penance, with its standard opening—
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned
—and carefully whittled laundry lists, all such confessions are calculated, perhaps most when they hope to erase the signs of calculation. I felt uneasy about the publication of the essay, whose contents surprised Rafe; it was so unlike the girl who confided little and admitted nothing. But I had wanted to tell a story, and that seemed to be the only one I had. If I hadn't quite admitted to myself that I was making a confession, in addition to danger and distaste the whole thing had something satisfyingly punitive to it. Something familiar. I liked it and I didn't like it.

The part I didn't like was how permeable the formula seemed to be. I adored
The Crack-Up
,
Drinking: A Love Story
, and anything Mary Karr had so much as cursed at, but more often you got raw self-exposure, conformed to a predetermined idea of what will inspire—or worse, trigger—the coveted empathetic response. All the better if the author is mixed up in the difficulty and discomfort of being a girl. Disconcerted by my own predictability, I retreated to my notebook and the fledgling art of e-mail, where I set the limits and decided how I might work within them.

Along with discomfort, that headline delivered an etymological redundancy:
addiction
, drawn back to its Latin root,
addicere
, suggests a form confession:
ad
, “to,” and
dicere
, “say, declare.” In its earliest, compound form, the declarative sense of the verb had weaselly connotations, meaning, variously, “to sacrifice, to sell out, to betray,” but also “to devote, consecrate; to adjudge, allot; to deliver, award; to yield, give assent; to make over, sell.” Our modern refurbishing of the word—begun in the early twentieth century, when the seemingly helpless state of opium and morphine stoners begged description—has given it a more passive meaning and therefore an ever-widening application. Addictions are still statements, of a sort—clinically they are often cited as symptoms of some larger issue—and in that sense generally involve a substance. But in becoming medical and then submitting to vernacular indignities, the concept of addiction has turned inward, and in that corollary realm its original meanings are more or less intact. Rather than engaging, betraying, devoting, awarding, assenting, or adjudging in relation to the world, we become the world—its innocent and all-knowing, the pure and the deceitful—and make those same statements unto ourselves.

I felt myself falling behind that spring, as though a train were leaving the station and a whole season was passed trying to run it down. I graduated on a bright, cool June afternoon, with a decent job and a boss promising to make me the youngest producer in the building. Rafe had made a confession of his own, bringing our meticulously unspoken feelings into the open for discussion, for decision. Soon after that we met: a drink, a show, a long talk in a cemetery. A blissful night. The next week I started up a fling with an intern who spoke only spotty English, then another colleague after that. Rafe was full of living plans and promises: he would tie my laces before dawn each morning and send me out the door in the stipulated pre-run silence; he had our children named and a dog picked out. I had no fantasies about our life together because beyond a nebulous dream involving New York, I couldn't imagine my own future at all. Unable to commit but unwilling to let him go, I made it my essential purpose to catch up. And learned, over the next two years and best as I ever have, what it is to fail.