There was news this week leaked to the press that schools might reopen for year sixes and Mei, having been putting on the bravest face for this lockdown, was happier than I have seen her, jumping up and down and texting her friends. It's just a report, but we need something to look forward to now, even if it doesn't happen. I keep dreaming every night — Yoko and I are lost somewhere in the car and it's raining. The phone isn't working and I can't bring up a map, but Yoko keeps driving. Or I am somewhere, a mall that was near my house when I was a teenager and I am trying to get an Uber back home, but I don't know where I live. There are sometimes other people with me, but sometimes I'm alone. I wake up and wander downstairs to scroll through my phone, look at the death count here and in the States, and wonder how we'll all remember this in ten years.
I had been training for a marathon since the autumn. I was supposed to run it this last month in Wales. I had trained through the winter, running in Germany when I was there and then in Sweden, when I hurt my back the very last day I was there. I remember still, in the middle of March, saying to someone, I wonder if it will be cancelled. I kept training through to the end though, as the restrictions started to come in more and more and it got to the point that they didn't even want you to run on the canals anymore. And then when it got cancelled, I kept gaining weight, running slower and slower, my shorts getting tighter and tighter.
Still though, I thought I would run the distance, avoiding the canals where I would have preferred to do it, and instead just run up and down Woodgate Valley nine times, with my Camelbak and some of these vegan jellies I had gotten to eat. I didn't think I would run well — all three months I've had in my mind that I could probably run a three-hour marathon given the right conditions, even though these would clearly not be those conditions. I started out anyway, early on the morning of the fifth of April, like I would have in Wales, but with my headphones in and carrying my water and running back and forth through the woods.
Things went well for about thirty minutes and then it all started to fall apart. I wasn't running fast — I was fat and bloated and the water was heavier than I thought. I was running the steps per minute that I wanted, but I was still slow and my water started to go. It was warmer than it had been, and when I got to the eighteenth or nineteenth mile, I had nearly run out of water, was sweating and exhausted and decided I need to end at the petrol station where I could get water, rather than my plan to walk home after finishing in a flat space. But it became clear as I was going that I wouldn't make it, and when I turned back on mile twenty-three, I knew it was over. I tried to take a sip from the Camelbak and there was nothing there. I came over one of the hills and there on the trash can, leftover from the night before, some party that must have happened in the woods, was a rockstar energy drink. I took it without thinking — it was almost completely full and I poured out some to see there was nothing else in it, and drank out of it.
My kids are old enough now that I can say what I want sometimes without scaring them. They know to account for my pessimism. Naomi asked me, for a school project, if I believed in life after death and I said, of course not. She said why, and I said, what were you before you were born? You were nothing, and she wrote that down.
I barely finished, hobbling to the petrol station where I had to ask the attendant to get water and sports drink for me, because they weren't letting anyone in the shop. I sat on the cement and felt again the crushing sense of failure that this year has been, realising that I needed to ask Yoko to come pick me up and drive me home like a child. I sat in the sun and waited and she came in our grey Picasso, a towel over the seat for me to sit on, and an apple. I'm sorry, I said, thank you.
There must be nothing when you die. How will you know when you're dead anyway: you feel your arms start to go numb, but that's nothing new. Your vision has narrowed this much before. You just press on, you keep running, you'll be fine. The dreams are strange, but everything is strange now. What was I before I was born, I think that in my dream too, standing in someplace that dissolved into something else, that underground supermarket in Helsinki or is it Mundelein in Illinois. The mind soft assembles a reality to offer you, that it thinks you might accept. This seems real enough. There are some familiar parts.