Running from the Bull

The bull market had been good to Marcus. Good to his portfolio, good to his ego, terrible to his marriage. Three years of aggressive returns and three years of parallel distance from Elena, until she'd finally packed her things and left him alone in their glass-walled apartment overlooking the city.

Now he ran.

Every morning at 5:30, lacing up shoes while the city slept, his breath fogging in the pre-dawn chill. Running became his new religion—no strategies, no spreadsheets, just the rhythm of his own heart and the pavement unfurling beneath him. He ran until his legs burned, until the numbers stopped scrolling behind his eyelids.

"You look like hell," she'd told him at their last padel match. Elena had shown up at the club with him—Daniel, the landscape architect who made Marcus's calculated risk-taking look like cowardice. They'd played mixed doubles. Marcus had spent the entire match watching how Daniel touched Elena's back between points, gentle and unconscious. The way she'd laughed at something Daniel whispered, head tilted back, throat exposed.

The bull—his father's nickname for him, aggressive and stubborn—had wanted to smash his racquet against the glass wall. Instead, he'd shaken Daniel's hand with his dead-fish grip and congratulated them on their win.

"You can't bear it, can you?" Elena had asked afterward, watching him from across the net. She meant everything. The way Daniel made her coffee in the morning. The weekend trips to the coast she posted about. The simple, unmonetized happiness she'd found with someone who didn't measure life in quarterly returns.

"I'm fine," he'd said, the lie tasting like copper.

That had been three months ago. This morning, running past the closed padel club, something shifted. The bull market was correcting. His phone showed pre-market indicators flashing red, red, red. For the first time in years, he didn't care.

He stopped running. Stood bent over, hands on knees, gasping in the morning air. A real bear had been sighted in the foothills last week—some wandering juvenile from the mountains, confused and searching for territory. Marcus understood suddenly, with perfect crystalline clarity. He was the bear, wandering through terrain he no longer recognized, carrying the weight of a life that no longer fit.

He straightened up. Walked back toward the apartment, not running anymore. It was time to stop running from the bull and start learning how to live like something else. Something softer. Something that could bend without breaking.

His phone buzzed with a market alert. He silenced it. Kept walking.