The summer of running has given itself over to the dark autumn mornings, the day creeping to equity with the night, and the timetabled demands of work and family. I have retreated back to the treadmill in the Newman University gym, staring at myself running in the mirror and thinking about whether or not I got any better this year. I weighed myself one morning a few weeks ago and then last week, but it was pointless. I knew that my weight had not changed; I had realised the thing I should have realised the first thousand times I was told it. I want to declare myself healed like the daughter of Canaanite woman that Jesus rebuked (Matthew 15:21-28), but I know the moment I do that, I will be sick again.
In May of the year that we came to the UK, I won a PhD studentship out of the blue. I fell into it: I hadn't earned it or done anything worthwhile except respond to a few emails. I got lucky, is what I mean, and everything started changing. The week after I heard, I went away for a conference about metaphor in Cáceres — I met my supervisor for the first time and remember now the place we had coffee, looking out on the Spanish countryside, espresso in small paper cups. I was ecstatic. I flew through Madrid and a Christian friend, someone I knew from college met me, and we walked around the city and he awkwardly prayed over me on a bench in a plaza, asking God for emotional healing. We drank champagne in the bathroom of the airport, hiding from a security guard, and I went to Moscow for a day and then back, through Tokyo, the whole of the world buzzing inside me like things now, things finally, had come together.
When we left Japan, ten years ago next week, we had blind faith. We sold everything and I was cruel and hasty the way you are when you're twenty six and terrified. We put the things we didn't sell or give away, the things I reluctantly agreed to take with us, into plastic tubs. Naomi was so small and I had no idea what I was doing. We gave up so much, things that I still miss and tell stories about. A good mattress and a big refrigerator. And the tatami mats as I think about it, that smell of tatami. We just left and then we were here, in Milton Keynes, misty and cold and green. I rode to the Open University on my Japanese Louis Garneau eighteen speed road bike, the bike I wasn't willing to give up and took on the plane because it was free to take bikes on planes back then. I looked for an apartment while Naomi and Yoko stayed in the one bedroom we had at the B&B in Woolstone. I don't remember anything else. I remember meeting two or three people. I remember how lucky I felt.
On the anniversary of that day, when I took the hired car up the M1 for the first time, my little family sleeping in it, ten years after that, the plasterer comes to the house on Victoria Road in Birmingham, the house that I own a small part of. Yoko and I both have dentist appointments. Naomi goes to school, or I walk her towards school until she meets some friends. Yoko takes the other girls, both in the juniors' department of St Peter’s now. This is still not ideal, though, not in my mind at least. I have a list of things that make me unhappy with our current situation — I gesture angrily in the direction of Finland, like it would save me from disappearing into my own navel, being anything other than what I am. You are still lucky, you are still falling ass-backwards into everything, that is the truth isn't it. I look at my aging, my exhausted face in the mirror after twenty minutes of running at tempo pace, as I bring up the speed of the treadmill another half-kilometer. I'm lucky — I've always been lucky.