The winter is not as cold as it should be and I'm running still. My knee stopped hurting at some point, but when pain goes away, sometimes you can't notice it. You have to think back on it, think back to a time when you might have expected to feel it and there is nothing there, no memory of it. There is one place I had always felt it, going up the first hill on the way out towards the university — I can think of it because I had always started thinking that I had somehow overcome it and then it would be there, and I would think to myself that I should stop. Now, without the pain, the anticipation of the pain is also gone and I run and run and run and am unhappy with my time and my weight and everything that I think I can control, but the pain, the thing I can't control, is gone.
I'm staying in a 150 year old house near town in Växjö, the town I can never pronounce until I get here and hear a Swedish person say it and I think, ah yes, I have have not been saying it right, have I. I know it well enough now that when I arrive I don't need to pull out my phone to make sense of where we are and all my past, my last times here alone and with the family, come back in the ways that old memories do. The summer I ran and ran early in the morning went swimming in the lake before seven, the way you can here, just pulling off all your clothes and running into the water, it slowing you down until you fall into it and it catches you.