The Girl Who Runs a Lot

Every day this week I've seen the blonde girl from number ten across the road leave the house to go running. She wears red trainers and sometimes black Lycra leggings with red stripes down the side and sometimes black running shorts, with a different t-shirt every time. She doesn't look as nice in sports kit as she normally does, but I don't think she's trying to look nice so it's not very important. She's usually gone for about 40 minutes. I couldn't run for 40 minutes. Today she was gone for an hour.

I wonder why she runs every day, all of a sudden? Maybe she wants to lose weight. I don't think she needs to. Perhaps she's training for a marathon. But I think there's something more to it than that. She seems so relieved when she starts running. And she seems relieved when she stops. But it's a different kind of relief. When she stops she's physically relieved. But when she starts... When she starts it looks as though she's slipping into a warm bath after a hard day at work. As though she's escaping from something. 

Maybe that's it. She runs to escape. She's running away from something. Or she's running back to something. Perhaps if she runs fast enough she can go back in time. That's the other thing. When she's finished, it seems as though she's physically relieved. But also disappointed. As though, no matter how fast she ran, she got nowhere. Nowhere she wanted to be. She never caught up with whoever or whatever or whenever it was that she was chasing.

I can't tell from my window, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't tears, not sweat, rolling down her cheeks.