I wake up in the morning and I am running and I won’t stop until I fall asleep again. I slough the covers and run to the washroom and take a shower and brush my teeth and throw my hair into something like a style and before I know it I am making breakfast. Flipping eggs and frying bacon and spreading butter on freshly popped toast and scarfing it down all the while hating myself for craving the calories. I have counted them and the number hangs in front of my eyes it hovers in the air it won’t leave me along as my legs begin to itch and I want to move again I want to be on the go I want to be running.

I break through the door like I have just attained the speed of sound like I am passing through a vapour barrier like I am a gleaming metal machine screaming through the thinnest air. When my feet hit the pavement I am no longer human I am instead something that cannot be stopped like a mess of chrome and wire and electronic impulses. I suck air into my lungs I flex I streak forward I scream I make the muscles stretch and creak until I am again human and burning and panting and sweating and I am finally at work.

He calls and we have a conversation full of action verbs and short nouns that pop when you say them that sound like firecrackers going off. When I hang up the phone my legs are itching again and I can barely contain myself as I launch myself into the fray into the mass of people all running all the time. I am the finest I am the best I am their finest and also their proudest child. I am everywhere at once making things happen never running out of energy taking short liquid bursts from a plastic bottle I will crumple into a sharp ball and toss perfectly into a trash can ten feet away to the applause of my coworkers my superiors my subordinates my admirers. A plastic bottle and then another and then another and then another and some sort of energy bar that looks and tastes like sugary cardboard.

Ten hours lapses into night and I am running back home again I am passing the same storefronts the same people nodding hello the same streets the opposite way. I break through the door as if it isn’t there and I am home. I call him and we say things that people say to each other we talk for a half hour and finally run out of things to say and hang up the phone abruptly as if we have both realized the words are superfluous anyhow and we will not see each other’s faces for another month and this fact depresses us both. When we finally meet for one of our brief dalliances rendezvous flings romances we will run out of things to talk about and chaste ways to touch each other and fill the rest of the time with what we won’t talk about later except at angles and in ways that neither of us will acknowledge.

I begin a whirlwind dinner marathon the calorie count once again going into the positives but just barely just enough to keep me alive and running. I feel my stomach where I keep feeling my stomach every day my stomach and it is the same size the same bit of baby fat and I hate it. I keep taking down the mirror and covering them with towels accidentally so I don’t have to see my naked ugliness the ugly nakedness I know is there anyways the naked ugliness I can see when I close my eyes when I am not running when that calorie count goes too far into the positive. Somewhere in the back of my mind I know I know I know this is not healthy that this is not right and that I am obsessing and that I will one day feel my kidneys heart marrow skin vision shot through with rot and falling and failing and that I will die. In the meantime all I can see is the road ahead the road that I am running down that is running me down that is gradually coming to an end. It is my private vice my hidden disease that I can look the picture of health yet barely eat anything yet keep running running running running.

He doesn’t know my parents don’t know my sister doesn’t know no-one knows except me and my mirror and my legs and my shoes and my scantily clad cupboards and fridge. Before bed I distract myself by running out in the cool night air beneath a sky strewn with stars pounding pavement until I can no longer remember why I hated myself despised something what was I was thinking it no longer matters.

I fall into bed like it is Easter Island and I am made of stone and in my dream I am running away from something and not sure what it is though I am successful I am perfect I am all the things I want to be it is something something past something I cannot remember something that is chasing me and running me down as I feel my skin marrow kidneys synapses heart liver muscles shot through with rigor mortis and I can no longer move and I am staring it in the face it knows me and I know it yet when I wake up I can no longer remember what it was.

I wake to the sound of waves on a beach or static or thunder or something and I slough off the dream like sheets.

Tags: fiction