Run for Good

Lacy left her lazy husband. She kicked up the dust as she ran. She didn’t think beyond that moment. It was better not to think too far ahead. If she did, she’d panic. She left the house without anything but the sneakers on her feet and a couple of bank notes stashed in a wallet secured to her torso. Her legs felt long and free. They’d felt ensnared for so long. Stretching them was a kind of ecstasy she’d been imagining for a decade.

She was an athlete in school before she met Tim. She thought he was a good guy, but she hadn’t known the real Tim then. She had only seen the mask he wore for public approval. She’d loved running the way most people love their religion, only perhaps even more passionately. It was the driving force within her. It was the time she felt most alive. She was energised with every stride she took. Her soles slammed rhythmically against the asphalt. It was like the return of a life-affirming pulse to someone that had just flatlined.

With each sharp exhalation, Lacy repeated the mantra “I am strong” inside her head. She had excellent endurance for someone that hadn’t run in so many years. Physical endurance felt like nothing compared with the mental endurance required of her to survive her home life. She’d been desperately unhappy and until that day, she thought it would take something incredibly complex and obscure to fix it. But her feet beating out a simple tempo was all it took.

There was no finish line in her mind. Lacy would keep running forever. If she didn’t stop, she didn’t have to think an unwanted thought. They only surfaced when she was idle, and she’d had enough idleness for a lifetime. The sense of dread had finally lifted from her stomach. She felt like every cell of hers had awoken again. She felt like Lacy Lee; not Lacy Andrews, the quieter half of an unsatisfying partnership: one that had drained her of her running spirit.

The feelings she had whenever she sprinted were ones of invincibility. She could take charge of her own life. She didn’t have to hear her husband’s brittle voice dictating her every move. She could silence the bully she’d dealt with for so long. She could minimise him and turn the volume down on his voice until he was like a mere flea in the distance. Indistinctly, she could hear his complaints, as they grew quieter and quieter. “Lacy, did you get all the laundry done?” “Lacy, did you make dinner yet?” “Lacy, cover yourself up. Other men don’t need to see your legs.”

She’d always loved her legs; not for their shapeliness, as he might have thought, but for their power. They were as strong as two century old tree trunks. They moved like the limbs of a lioness. Her husband’s sedentary lifestyle looked like a recipe for early death from afar. She could zoom out and see it from a perspective that allowed her to see how unhealthy it was. He’d forced her to live under the constraints that supported his preferred lifestyle, but what about Lacy’s?

She felt her hatred of him being released with every grand step. She was moving across the state, and in her mind, she could keep moving across state lines, up to the very edges of the country. She could run to the coastline and then stand on the Pacific coast, inhaling the air of another life. Her legs didn’t tire at all. She was getting rid of all the built-up tension she’d kept, contained for so long. She’d been still for too many years.

Lacy got out of town and ran through the countryside. She passed by bodies of water, animals, huge changes in the sky. She felt the weather morph and change, from mild to rainy to sunny. She was transforming along with the shifts of nature. She didn’t recognise anything around her anymore. She ran with purpose. There was no reason to hesitate. Nothing could threaten her like the prospect of staying stagnant, of staying in a place in which she’d intimately known every dull detail. She knew every image on the wallpaper of the home she’d left, and it had brought her no comfort. It had made her want to scream, seeing the same sights, day in, day out. At least in the company of nature, she wasn’t confined to an existence that suffocated her.

Lacy’s feet thumped with certainty. She didn’t break her pace for a second. She observed and ran and thought about little else. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty. She planned to worry about that later. Nothing would interfere with her running. Hours went by. She could have been a marathon runner; one in training day and night, but she wasn’t. She shouldn’t have had any fitness, but her anger made her unstoppable. She reached the state line and moved north. She had no intention of slowing down, at least until her body forced her to. She’d been ignoring its desires for too long. Why had she given up running for the sullen man she lived with? She was afraid when she’d been under that roof. He’d felt like the dictator, and she was just a quiet citizen. But crossing into a new state, she felt like no one would ever tell her what to do again.

An engine hummed like the irritating buzz of a fly. It was getting closer and closer, but Lacy didn’t bother to turn around. It caught up with her and the window rolled down. “Hey,” a much too-familiar voice called. Lacy’s eyes met the driver. She didn’t slow her pace.

The car chugged along, complainingly. She outran it without even exerting herself.

“Lacy,” he boomed, like the predictable bully he was. “You can’t run forever.”

“That’s what you think,” she shouted and flipped him the bird, taking off like an eagle into the beautiful abyss of the future.

The car came to a stunned stop. For a second, she half-expected him to get out and follow her on foot, but he didn’t. So, Lacy ran for what felt like forever, alone.