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Show home. My period stopped but I did not. I cried if I drank a milkshake and shook when the bread in the restaurant arrived buttered. When I could not run because of a blizzard or a bruised ankle, I jumped rope entire afternoons. Every day I weighed myself, my body dissolving like salt in water. You are so tiny, a stranger says to me, beer in hand, standing in a friend's kitchen, when you turn sideways you disappear. So when John rejected my body, turned from my kisses, called me his sister, his friend, when he finally boarded the plane on a ticket his parents had paid for, I ran witi\a savageness I had not felt since college. That fall, now in graduate school on the mainland, I trained for a marathon. Training made my obsession with running more acceptable, veiled my self-destruction. Logging miles, running all morning, running twice a day was what one did to prepare for a marathon. I found strength in my ability to canvas the city, to run between cities, to run out of road. Hills, trees, and homes appeared on the horizon only to be surpassed. I was a fast runner, a strong runner, and I looked for other runners-men in particular-to pass. Running for hours on end, I was amazed by my body's ability to keep going. No matter what I asked of it-to run farther, faster, to run without water-it responded. Fifteen miles, twenty miles, hours away from my apartment I pulled my mind to the surface long enough to note, still running, before returning inward to the numb space running created. An entire Saturday morning would slip by without once thinking about John, his 227 |
