A Different Way Home
You know the feeling when you see someone but it’s too late to turn around or dart into a dark alley without looking like you’ve lost the plot. With lightning speed, you compose your facial expression as though passing them will seem like the most nonchalant event in the world; your heart rate and stomach tell a different story.
Whether it’s an ex-partner, ex friend, ex anyone, but someone that used to mean a lot to you in the past, shared lives, laughter, connection, friendships and then it’s over. It doesn’t really matter how it ended, the emotions you feel is because at one point in your life that person mattered. And now they’re no longer part of that world.
As is the norm now for my weekend run, my daughter and I run together. This week she’d chosen the route, as I listened to her describe the twists and turns, my nervous system spiked. I immediately said, “oh I don’t usually do that route that way round” I felt uncomfortable but said “it’s fine”. I’d felt something and then I dismissed it.
We set off through the woods, a route I’d run a thousand times before, it was peaceful, and it was lovely. The air was fresh, the sun just peeking out from behind the trees, the shadows were still cool, almost that perfect temperature to run in.
As we settled into our rhythm, I heard Poppie say “shit”.
I looked up and immediately saw what she was seeing. I’m sure we both felt the same sinking recognition of knowing it was too late to turn around.
About twenty runners were approaching us, I knew them instantly. Maybe it was the familiarity of their technique or the ease in which they ran; it was the new running group, formed from my old run club.
They were running together with the well-worn rhythm of a group, well, used to running together. One of the runners is running London Marathon tomorrow, this was her final run before taper week and the others surrounded her like a huge hug of cotton wool and warmth, just like I’d taught them.
As we passed I smiled, I said hello, I wished the marathon runner a cheery “Good luck for next Sunday!” Some of them noticed us a bit too late, a couple couldn’t quite hold eye contact, a lovely “oh hello” in the way you say it when your face has arrived at a conclusion a beat ahead of your voice. There were two walkers at the back, I thought they might be the ones to smile the widest, in my head I was already mid-hug, mid-how-are-you?
But isn’t it funny how your instinct knows how to behave. Maybe it’s the slight twitch of a mouth that whispered, just like my daughter shit. Which we all know means what do we do now, how do we act. And of course because we’re women who’ve been taught to smooth over any social awkwardness, we just say hi.
And it’s a flat hi, one that you generally give to someone whose name you can’t quite remember. But it’s a very clear signal that you’re not up for a conversation.
And so, we passed each other, the way that polite strangers pass each other on a path on a Sunday morning.
My daughter asked if I was ok, she asked if this was why I’d questioned the route when she’d suggested it earlier. I said yes, probably, I’d obviously picked up something from somewhere without quite noticing it. She didn’t push it. We kept running.
On the way back, we saw them again, but now the group had grown. More people had joined on the second leg, a bigger knot of familiar bodies moving together through the late morning. This time, I turned off the route before we reached them and we looped another way home.
I built the club, and I designed the session they were running; I taught and coached all the runners running this same route with many of them for the first time, when they were terrified of leaving the car park and for many years afterwards. The tradition of support and celebration was the language of the run club.
But I won’t be in the photograph they take afterwards, or at the coffee shop and I’m not on the list of people waiting at the finish line in London tomorrow. I’m not in the Facebook group where the run was arranged, and I wasn’t even meant to know it was happening. I found out about my own absence the way you find out about these things now, from a post written by someone else to someone else, that I read twice because the language of not-quite-belonging is still new to me.
Closing the club was the right decision, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a space left behind, and it’s a strange kind of grief, being outside something you once held together.
The runners on that route on Sunday were doing exactly what I taught them to do, that fact that it still works without me is proof that the building worked. And now I am the person I worked hard to make sure didn’t exist in that space.
And if you’re reading this having left something, a marriage that was eroding you, a job that stopped being yours, a friendship group that re-formed around someone else, or a community you built from love, I wanted you to know you’re not alone in this strange space. The right decisions can still leave you standing on the outside of something you used to be the centre of. It takes time to get used to something new.
My daughter and I turned off the route before we passed the runners the second time, round and we went a different way home.