One Night I Ran 7 Miles Flat-Out & Returned Before You Knew I Had Gone.

The children were waking and you were soothing them, hush, hush, hush-a-bye and I was raging and couldn’t sleep, couldn’t relax, couldn’t wait for you and didn’t want to either. I slipped on my shoes and some old songs; hit the roads running and didn’t come back for an hour.

I ran and ran and ran and ran. I ran through long motorway tunnels without hard shoulders; belting down the inverse camber, strip lights blasting down on my head and trucks getting too close. It was a constant sprint and when I emerged into the starry night I only upped the pace.

Somewhere in the north of the city I ran out of puff, ploughing down residential streets god knows where; the underpass, the overpass, a tangle of highways and freeways and motorways, roaring and roaring and roaring on. I stood there amidst the tangle, heart pounding.

I wondered what you were doing and whether you wondered where I had gone. It was about 11.30 at night I think. Perhaps midnight. I’d run from my home at an Olympic pace in one direction, away, and not stopped till my digital bracelet said 10k.

I was forlorn and the city was an octopus of asphalt and grime. Grey apartments in the night mist, the smog and the sharp stars baying somewhere overhead. I caught a taxi home and realised I had no money. Light pockets to run unencumbered. Free as a bird amid the iron girders.

I made him wait in the car whilst I slipped into the house in search of cash. From the bedroom a quiet murmur. All the rooms empty and the children drifting off. I paid him and set him on his way, slipped inside again for a shower, coming out at midnight as she emerged from their room.

A disinterested face. The house full of steam from my ablutions. When was I going to bed? Oblivious to my adventure, my racing heart and heaving breath having soon subsided. The race well run, formidably run, the competitors left standing; the finishing line nowhere in sight.

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