Our neighbour on Victoria Road who is talking to Yoko as I pass by on my way home after running, says to me, Do you know why I hate you? with a look of preparedness and anticipation, ready to reveal the second half of the joke. I pull out my earphones, disoriented, confused — the answer comes quickly: because you are so energetic, she says. I smile, embarrassed, aware of the insufferability of exercising in public, where others can see you and assume you are, in your good health, attempting to shame them. I demur the way one should demur, offering some false apology, downplaying whatever energy I might appear to have and pessimistic with some reference to my age and how I must be getting to the twilight of my running years, my knees are sure to give out. It's only a matter of time. She quickly says that she doesn't really hate me, and I should keep running while I can, and I thank her, apologise again and continue up Victoria Road, towards the house, struggling to find my keys and peeling off my clothes.
With winter coming, and the looming date of our application for indefinite leave to remain, the final visa stage which should secure our future in the UK, the days pass with the slow, uneasy expectation that some increased suffering is both coming and will pass. Like I imagine the feeling before childbirth. I have a list of things now to accomplish, the things that I can do myself and the things I need others to do with and for me, but at some point in February next year, maybe, March, it will have all passed. The passports will be with the Home Office for one hundred and eighty days and we will be chained to the city, to Harborne, to our little world with the children coming and going, the backpacks piled in the entryway, and some house project to be done. There will be nothing left to do but wait.
My left foot, the ball of my foot connected to my middle toe, is sore on long runs because the new shoes feel a half-size smaller than they are. I don't mind enough to replace them and they are still new enough that they should give in eventually. With the autumn darkness creeping in, I run in the dark, leaving around six and heading to the canals, towards the city. It's three kilometers to the canal in Selly Oak, and when you finally reach it, having crossed four lanes of traffic several times, the water is still and sunken down in the city. The bridges you run under are dark, and there is a nervous excitement running towards them, like running towards a black hole. Of course, it is nothing like a black hole — you enter it and suddenly your eyes adjust and you see the end. All you need to do is trust in what you know about the bridges, your own experience of running on this path. The fear wells up, comes up to the edges, but it's manageable, isn't it. You keep running through the dark and eventually you hear the bell tower, Old Joe at the University of Birmingham, striking six thirty or seven on the way back and there it is. Everything has been fine, like they said it would be fine.