On Directing

On Directing – Tegan & Sara (listen in new tab)

Her feet drive hard into the sidewalk and spring her away from the earth with each stride. She imagines herself making small craters in the concrete. She’s found her pace as her skin begins to glaze with sweat; her shirt and running shorts cling to her skin, damp with the early morning spring air.

She breathes out. In. Her lungs fill with cool wet air from last night’s rain. Her mouth forms the words: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” They sound thin, harsh with exertion. The sentence collapses. Each word collides into the other, a Doppler pile-up against her lips, before they slide across her reddened, runner’s blushed cheeks. They curve and roll over the headphones stuck to her ear by sweat. Then they are lost in the vortexes created by her bobbing pony tail.

Shannon started running after she moved in with her parents. The doctor told her the exercise would help. Give her something to focus on, something to pull her out of her head. Before the abortion, she’d been a creature of infinite terrifying density, and after too. But now, right now, she feels like she can shake that off each time she bites hard on the cliché: harder, faster, push yourself. She wants to be a current, an article of flow and flux.

Today will be a long run. She’s training for the coming gauntlet of charity 10k races. Maybe a 20k later in the summer.

Really: she has a lot to purge from her mind. Each stride, each cycle of breath, her mind spins. She wants to lose herself in her repetitious body, but it’s too early in her run for that.

Later. Don’t think about it.

She counts footsteps out loud, repeats mantras, encouragements. But between each assertion of not thinking about it, her thoughts wedge in.

Why see K now? What did you expect?

She wanted to see him the moment Claire told her about K and Maura being together. Claire had waited a long time to say anything about it. She is a good friend that way. How is her store doing? Shannon hasn’t been since Claire bought it.

She turns a corner, heads through an empty suburban park. No one is out this early on a Saturday. The isolation helps.

Over the last few days she dissected her visit with K. Everything he said about his life, the library, Ulysses’s. The sparse way he discussed Maura. His body language as he listened to Shannon’s account of slow improvements. The old jokes. The new ones.

He’s the same; the same scattered goofball, holding onto a few too many threads. The same irresistible way he makes connections between everything.

It doesn’t matter. She can’t interpret any one thing’s importance.

Except: as he walked her back to the subway they held hands (for like 45 seconds). Unconscious habit? Where does that come from? When he realized, he let go and apologized, scratching absently at the back of his head (as he always does). She liked the shaky familiarity of having K near her - of the casual firmness of his hand holding hers, their fingers knitted. Even for those brief moments.

The intimacy is a tempting, well-tread path, now neglected and overgrown with peregrine change. He said to call him sometime. She wants to and doesn't want to. She utters a curse on the static pull of this indecisiveness.

She passes a  faded plastic and metal play structure that sits where the park path forks (or reconnects). She's happy she doesn't have to make a decision right now.