A small bell rang.
“Hey, I didn’t know you were a runner!” He smiled after me, five or six slabs of sidewalk behind. I turned, breathless, to find him leaning out from behind the metal-framed glass door of a Chinese restaurant; the inside air and the outside air became the same. His electric grin pulled on the hinges of his jaw as his body pulled on the hinges of the door. I wondered how often those hinges would need to be replaced.
What must have been his wife and kids stared from their slimy table; both daughters had lambent blonde hair like their mother.
Something in me was a blaring siren.
He made this declarative statement, about my being a runner, under the assumption that running is what makes one a runner. It isn’t. Much like smoking does not necessarily make somebody a smoker, and eating Chinese food does not make somebody Chinese. My stomach discovered its emptiness as the salty, greasy aroma of chicken and vegetables wafted from the doorway of what used to be a hair salon. The smell was much different then. I used to walk home from school. I remembered passing by the salon, the cloud of hairspray, stinging my nostrils, and the scent of freshly cut hair, warm from a razor or damp from a wetted comb. I wanted to be a fireman then. And a baseball player.
“Well, I used to be a runner,” I explained.
“Used to be a runner?” He was astonished. “What do you mean you ‘used to be a runner’?”
Well, runners train, I thought. Runners have a goal, an objective in mind, I thought. Runners run for the purpose of being better runners; runners race other runners, I thought. I, on the other hand, just recently moved back into town and don’t have a membership to a gym. Besides, I’ve never enjoyed the conventional work out. I run for the purpose of staying healthy, though I actually enjoy it, too. I used to race; I used to be a runner, but not anymore. Granted, I had just run past him when he yelled after me. I was still wearing my sweats, still panting, still running until he caught my attention. I thought all of this, but did not say it.
“That is what I mean.” I did say that.
He nodded slowly, as if his head were resisting his neck’s urge to do so. I could almost hear the mechanic grinding of his rusted iron neck and the squeaking of little gears turning inside of his head. All in all, a machine had turned on that had not been engaged in many years.
“It’s been a long time,” he said, stepping from behind the door but catching it with his foot. It had been a long time. His mind was almost certainly sifting through the same memories as mine, the same filing cabinet of photo albums and high school class projects, the same dates and pranks and made-up games. Just about anything two best friends could have experienced in high school, we experienced together. I remembered freshman year and the first time we interacted, sitting together in first period Algebra. We cracked jokes from the back corner of the room, too tired to commit to mathematics, but awake enough to mock our teacher’s awful toupee. I remembered detention after detention after detention and how furious my mother used to get. We both rode the bus home from school that year. I remembered my first girlfriend, Jen; I remembered his first car. He used to love that car. He only let me borrow his car once ever (so I could pick up my tux at the last possible minute); I was supposed to pick him and Jen up from his house so we could rush to dinner and then to prom that night. I remembered her glowing blonde hair—beautiful, even messed up. My friend and I were the kind of friends that scheduled classes together intentionally and yet still saw each other out of class incessantly. We barged into each others’ homes without permission or even a mother’s stern look. We became natural elements in each others’ lives, like air, like earth. We knew each other too well, as deep friends should, and we trusted too well. I wanted to be a journalist then.
“Yeah, it has,” I replied, trailing, “it certainly has…” I was surprised by his declarative statements. I don’t run anymore, I thought. But how long had it been? I wondered. This irregular circumstance had turned a long held face of the past into an alarming image of abrupt recentness. There was a quiet panic inside me; a rioting in my stomach, yet my bones stood still. How long had it been? His car had been totaled; my girlfriend and I had broken up—both on the same night. I used to love her very much. My friend and I enrolled in different colleges and headed off in separate directions, keeping touch initially, but losing touch ultimately. I joined the cross country team in college, discovering my ability to run and my enjoyment of it. Racing was a big thing for me then. Somehow I’d forgotten that I never ran in high school. The last I had heard from him, he was a psychology major but was considering dropping out—I had no idea that he had gotten married. I ended up finishing school with a bachelor’s in business and advertising. I graduated and moved to a bigger city, basking in the perquisites of success, slowly developing pessimistic thought patterns. I gave up running after college.
Staring around and away from each other in uncomfortable wordlessness, we let the passing engines and the population replace our conversation. And we yearned so hard for silence.
Shrugging, he said, “Well, it was good seeing you, man. Are you in town for long?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I actually just moved back about a week ago.” I used to love this place.
“Well, then we’ll have to keep in touch,” he said. “You really used to be a runner, huh?” I assumed his question was rhetorical.
The tiny bell rang. “Jenny, babe, you’ll never believe who I just saw…!” I heard as the metal-framed door closed, dividing the air again: the outside air became the outside air and the inside air became the inside air. I continued running.
It occurred to me lying in bed that night that I knew what my epitaph should say, figuring that, by the time I died, it would be true.
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