Endless Laps

I've been running circles around this city for three months now. Not literally—though my legs would argue otherwise from the 5K routes I've started tracing through Memorial Park each dawn. Mostly, I'm running from the silence that settled into our apartment like dust after you left.

The key turns in the lock and I'm greeted by the only thing you couldn't take with you: that goddamn goldfish. He swims in his bowl on the kitchen counter, oblivious to the fact that he's become the custodian of our shared history. You named him Captain Flint, because we were going to be pirates together, you said. Now he's just a fish with a stupid name and I'm just a person who feeds him every morning and pretends I'm not talking to him sometimes.

"Still alive?" I ask, sprinkling flakes into his bowl. He bubbles at the surface.

At work, Marcus from accounting catches me in the break room. He's wearing that orange sweater—the one you said made him look like a traffic cone, but I told him it was nice once at the Christmas party and now he won't stop wearing it around me.

"You look tired, Sarah," he says, and there's something in his voice that sounds like an invitation I don't want to accept. "Running yourself ragged again?"

"I like running," I say, which is a lie. I hate running. I hate the way my lungs burn and my thoughts scatter and I can't focus on anything except the rhythm of my feet hitting pavement, which is exactly why I do it.

That night, I can't sleep. The goldfish is watching me from the kitchen. I turn on the bathroom light and stare at myself in the mirror—hair wild, eyes dark, looking like someone who's been running toward something and away from something else for so long she's forgotten which direction is which.

You sent me a text yesterday. Just "thinking of you." No context, no explanation, no acknowledgment that you're the one who packed your things in orange boxes and left me with the fish and the lease and the feeling that I'm living someone else's life.

The fish bubbles again.

I grab the orange box from the closet—the one you forgot, the one with your old running shoes inside. I haven't opened it since November. I carry it to the balcony and step into your shoes. They're too small now. My feet have grown.

The streetlights below flicker on as the sun sets behind the skyline, painting everything in shades of bruised orange and gray. Captain Flint swims another endless circle in his bowl, and I realize with a sudden, terrible clarity that I'm not running anymore—I'm just swimming in place.

I leave the box by the door. I leave the fish. I put on my own shoes and start running, not away from anything, but toward the first place in months that feels like forward.