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But it’s the only sport I can do because it doesn’t feel like a game. I was always useless at games. Fucking Catan with my family to in-class icebreakers, there were no exceptions. Too many rules and strategies to exploit. I didn’t like to think. I didn’t like that other people on my team would rely on me, watch me with their hopeful and hateful eyes, and it was always easier to let them down. When I joined the cross country team it was because the school forced me to take a sports credit. I walked my first 5k idly playing with my phone pretending on Google Maps to need to know where I was going. I didn’t care where I was going. I was lapped again and again. My time was somewhere above 45 minutes. To this day I’m not sure how I accomplished that. Walking it all the way probably would have been faster. I told people this with a laugh in my voice like I always do with my failures, and I didn’t receive respect like I wasn’t expecting, but at least the slightly-smiling reaction every time felt like a laughing with, even with the kind of disgusted look on their face. Seriously, why are you even here, I remember being asked, so many times at so many different occasions. Why come if you’re not even going to try? I don’t know when it was worse—when I didn’t know the answer, or when I really had been, with the full force of my effort, trying to try.
To be honest I hated this person, this useless, frail, impotent person. I was sick of always watching. I knew it was safer to stay on the side but that that was a sort of cowardice, too, a moral failure. So I mustered up the courage and I threw myself at the world. For a brief moment at seventeen I had everything I could want and it wanted me back. It really felt like a reward, like all my trying meant I won. Then the collapse.
Senior year I think for at least a hundred days straight I didn’t stop running. Every day. At school. After school. Outside and on the treadmill. At first there was some facsimile of reasonable reason: cross country meets, the beauty of the leaves on the autumn trees, sunk cost fallacy rearing its ugly head. And then it was a form of punishment. I had nothing to do after school, no friends, it felt like, who desired to spend their lazy hours with me, and slouched in bed I felt like I was becoming nothing. I ran to feel a sense of accomplishment. To know I could change something about myself—my body if not my mind.
Lots of colleges I really wanted to go to rejected me. I was lucky some colleges I didn’t accepted me. And then one I ended up at took me in at the last minute. I expected something like that. Through grueling senior year I knew I could withstand everything if I just made it through the school day, the week, the month, the year. Move out of the house. Be someone new, somewhere new, with new people, who would really get me. In a manic episode over the summer I ran twenty miles in a shorter timespan than I ever had. It was a hollow accomplishment but they were numbers. I was in love with numbers: they felt like ticking marks on a line towards my goal.
Well now that I’m here I want to say that I wish I never quit running. My legs don't move like that anymore and whatever I’ve been chasing has disappeared only further out of reach. There’s a metaphor to be made about Zeno’s paradox but it’s too obvious that it feels lazy. Even this writing is lazy. I know I could be using better words. Sentences with rhythm and meaning. But you know when you get that feeling like there’s something gnarled and caught under your throat. I was really coughing moments ago, recovering still from last week’s bad cold. Too much potential energy stored in the chest. Wanted to run off the face of the earth. But it wouldn’t do me any good.
I don’t want to die and I am glad I was born. And I love life. But not my own. Now that I have been in play I want out. Other people are beautiful and demanding. I can watch them forever and never move again in my life. Not one muscle. Not even my eyes.
To be honest I hated this person, this useless, frail, impotent person. I was sick of always watching. I knew it was safer to stay on the side but that that was a sort of cowardice, too, a moral failure. So I mustered up the courage and I threw myself at the world. For a brief moment at seventeen I had everything I could want and it wanted me back. It really felt like a reward, like all my trying meant I won. Then the collapse.
Senior year I think for at least a hundred days straight I didn’t stop running. Every day. At school. After school. Outside and on the treadmill. At first there was some facsimile of reasonable reason: cross country meets, the beauty of the leaves on the autumn trees, sunk cost fallacy rearing its ugly head. And then it was a form of punishment. I had nothing to do after school, no friends, it felt like, who desired to spend their lazy hours with me, and slouched in bed I felt like I was becoming nothing. I ran to feel a sense of accomplishment. To know I could change something about myself—my body if not my mind.
Lots of colleges I really wanted to go to rejected me. I was lucky some colleges I didn’t accepted me. And then one I ended up at took me in at the last minute. I expected something like that. Through grueling senior year I knew I could withstand everything if I just made it through the school day, the week, the month, the year. Move out of the house. Be someone new, somewhere new, with new people, who would really get me. In a manic episode over the summer I ran twenty miles in a shorter timespan than I ever had. It was a hollow accomplishment but they were numbers. I was in love with numbers: they felt like ticking marks on a line towards my goal.
Well now that I’m here I want to say that I wish I never quit running. My legs don't move like that anymore and whatever I’ve been chasing has disappeared only further out of reach. There’s a metaphor to be made about Zeno’s paradox but it’s too obvious that it feels lazy. Even this writing is lazy. I know I could be using better words. Sentences with rhythm and meaning. But you know when you get that feeling like there’s something gnarled and caught under your throat. I was really coughing moments ago, recovering still from last week’s bad cold. Too much potential energy stored in the chest. Wanted to run off the face of the earth. But it wouldn’t do me any good.
I don’t want to die and I am glad I was born. And I love life. But not my own. Now that I have been in play I want out. Other people are beautiful and demanding. I can watch them forever and never move again in my life. Not one muscle. Not even my eyes.
