Two of Us on the Run

The following is an excerpt of Sara Rauch’s XO, published by Autofocus Books on April 5, 2022.

That spring, after the tall piles of crusted snow cracked and Liam and I agreed to turn our attention back to our respective lives, Piper and I struck a fragile truce. We were polite in our interactions. We said Goodnight and thank you and do you mind. This seemed like the right development, and I was too busy with school, and the part-time job I picked up, to give it much more thought. I was trying: no dishes flung, no threats brandished. Fair enough. Piper decided to compete in a triathlon and I thought that sounded like a good outlet. It’s a lot of training, she said, but I think I can do it.

I’ll help with the running part, I offered.

She assessed me the way she often did those days, as if I were a stranger who had moved into her house and wouldn’t leave. I must’ve been sitting on the couch surrounded by books, pen in hand, or at the stove stirring rice, or petting a cat by the big window.

You hate running, she said.

I know, I know. I need an excuse to get out of here a little.

It was an easy omission to not mention the conversation about running Liam and I had after I pocketed the sand dollar months prior. We were careful to keep an arm’s width of space between us as we continued along the beach back into town. It wasn’t that we couldn’t be seen together, because we had and would continue to be, but that we needed to act casually about it—as if the electricity thrumming between us was yet another trick of light.

I’m training for a marathon, he told me.

That’s intense, I said.

I like running, he said.

This struck me as funny. Probably the only time you’d catch me running is if I was being chased by a mountain lion, I said.

How about a bear?

A loaded question, given his surly, grizzled persona. We stopped walking.

A bear? I repeated, careful to hold his gaze. Even I know better than to run from a bear.

Piper and I ran together for a few weeks, losing sync once on the path—I was slow and she was fast; then, the opposite—and after a while she came up with excuses to which I said nothing. There would be no triathlon, like there would be no bar, no homestead in the woods, no move to the West Coast, no ceremony.

I shifted my runs to complement my writing schedule. Mornings, after several hours of writing, I would pull up my hair, don leggings and a sports bra, slide my iPod into my waistband. I ran on the dike, a 5000 ft long, 23 ft high ridge of earth built to protect our city’s downtown from flood. Near our condo, it curved parallel to the highway, interrupted at one end by the town’s waste water treatment plant and a partially leafed-over tent city. At the other end, a copse of trees curled like a wave over a narrow path that emptied onto a side street feeding into the main road.

Back and forth I ran on that stretch, a blur beside the whooshing of the highway and the acres of farmland stretching off toward the river. Sometimes I pretended I was running toward Liam, others that I was running away. Mostly, though, I pretended nothing at all; I was a body moving through space, my mind muted. I understood, somewhere deep within, that what I felt for Liam, what I wanted from him, could never be realized in any kind of visible way; it was electric current with no viable conductor.

In Fred Rohé’s The Zen of Running, this rule stands out: “Run within your breath, do not run ahead of your breath. (you have to run to discover what that means.)”

There are many “shoulds” in regards to running, almost as many as in regards to relationships. They often contradict one another. To create intimacy, spend more time together or spend more time apart. To prevent injury, run in supportive shoes or run in none at all. Stretch before, stretch after, stretching is for wimps. Don’t change who you are, and don’t expect the other person to change. Compromise, compromise, compromise. Endure, endure, endure.

A good relationship, a friend told me, is one that runs on parallel tracks. It isn’t, she said, that you have to be moving at the same speed, only that as a couple you are moving toward the same goal. A good relationship, another friend offered, is like a marathon. There are highs and lows, times you want to give up and times that feel effortless, but the thing is to keep the goal in mind. But what is this elusive “goal” in the context of a relationship? There is no finish line to cross in the day-in-day-out monotony of making a life with someone. There are no mile markers offering an accurate depiction of how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go.

The modern-day marathon mimics the endurance required of early humans, for whom the act of long distance running was a necessity. As it turns out, distance running is natural to our species. Can the same be said for monogamy? What humans practice is “social monogamy”—observed mainly to ensure the successful raising of offspring. This “animal instinct” has less to do with the inborn physical body and all its unruly cravings and everything to do with long-term survival. When it comes to sprints, we lag well behind other apex predators. In the long hauls, however, we can prevail. We are distance runners because we have to be: our legacy as hunters depended on the ability to pace ourselves, to sweat, wearing down big game animals until they surrendered to the constructed weapons in our clawless hands.

A hunt (for our intents and purposes, the original marathon) has a marked beginning and end; can the same be said of a monogamous relationship? Perhaps the metaphor is more subtle than I first perceived. A hunt is not a one-and-done: a kill feeds the clan for several days, or weeks or months if the meat is carefully preserved. A hunt is one of many, played out over the landscape of a person’s lifetime, and so are the negotiations of a long-term, monogamous relationship. In this type of relationship, some days you feast and others you run for your life.

To rise each morning and begin again demands a within rather than an ahead.

I was more surprised than anyone by how I fell in love with running. Through the humid summer days and into fall as the blazing leaves patterned the path, I ran, until the earnest New England winter glazed the roads with ice. December was busy anyway. I was working forty-plus-hour retail weeks during the break between semesters, and there was my thirty-third birthday, Christmas and Hanukah, New Year’s Eve. Ahead loomed Liam, who would be back for another residency in my program. Piper was busy preparing to take her entire upper-level class to Guinea, a grand undertaking that filled her with awe and apprehension. I started to formulate a plan, to brace myself for the inevitable surge of emotions I knew awaited on my trip to the Pacific Northwest coast. I would be strong; I could flirt but not cross the line—no late-night rendezvous and definitely no kissing.

That winter, I spent my birthday working a long shift during a snow storm. Though several months had passed since Liam and I had last connected, that evening, I walked home through the hushed snow globe of downtown, anxious to check my email. The house was empty, Piper having gone out to a potluck despite the weather, and I poured a bourbon and opened my computer. There was his name, the subject line empty, a happy birthday wish contained within the message. I sipped, aware that if it weren’t for social media he’d have no way of knowing my birth date, and decided that detail didn’t matter. He’d taken the time to think of me.

A couple weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I went with Piper and some friends to a bar across the river. I had no desire to be there. I was too tired for small talk. Driving home, I heard a sharp crack. Then, a question: Was that our tire?

At our friend’s apartment we found the threadbare back tire had blown. Our friend, a committed punk rock minimalist, didn’t own a car. He invited us inside to call AAA, but at 2AM on New Year’s morning, I knew the wait would be longer than the two-mile walk.

Are you sure? he asked. I don’t mind. You can sleep here.

I refused again, wanting only what I’d wanted all night—to be cozy and contained and alone. But we were not dressed for the weather. It was a frigid walk home.

Due to an unprecedented ice storm and days of flight cancellations, I touched down in the Northwest shortly after midnight on the first day of the residency. When I used the bathroom outside baggage claim, I discovered my period had come on, and in that weary moment I was grateful for its arrival. My periods are robust and distracting. Even if I were tempted by Liam, I reasoned, I wouldn’t be so vulnerable as to allow him access to something that messy.

A friend picked me up at the airport and we drove the two-hour trip to the coast in the wee hours, so that I could be there for the opening remarks later that morning. We talked about failed relationships, romantic expectations, how people change and how hard it can be to change with them. We did not talk about whether the Universe was indifferent or predetermined, though the thought weighed heavy on my mind. While navigating the clogged customer service hotlines and three layovers of my twenty-four-hour travel day, I’d bargained with the Universe, as if it were listening. I would be good, I vowed. I loved Piper and I would behave accordingly, if only it would get me across the country on time. Which it had.

But by the end of that long first day, being once again in Liam’s presence, he’d pressed, very lightly, very casually, against my back with his own. We had exchanged our pleasant greetings, and now we were each in conversation with someone else. No one in the room was aware of the galvanizing seam our bodies created in that moment. It was up to me: move or stay.

In classic story structure, Freytag’s Pyramid, there is an inciting incident that kicks off the narrative. We see this also in the Hero’s Journey—the call to adventure. When we tell a story, we choose this inciting incident; in life, the beginning is often obscured. Was Hello our inciting incident? The kiss? The chaste connection in an unexpected city? The eye contact across the crowded room that morning? Or was it now, when I plugged into what this electrifying force could do, and lingered, giving the current a conduit.

When I was making my exit that night, Liam pantomimed a question at me across the bar, and I rested my head on my hands as if asleep and left before any more could be gestured. I was exhausted, and without his body electric against mine I’d swung back to my determination to be good, and I walked home with my friends and took a sleeping pill.

The next morning, up way too early, groggy from doxylamine and jet lag, I found an email from him, time-stamped 12:02AM:

It was a dark and stormy night.

Alone in my room, I laughed out loud. A winter gale had ripped through while I floated in and out of restless slumber: high winds and epic waves, driving rain. Later, I’d find the beach littered with enormous blackened tree stumps still attached to their root balls, barnacled planks, an entire field of displaced sand dollars. Now, in the pale dawn light, the buildings outside my window appeared cleansed. I made myself a cup of coffee before replying, blind to his metaphor and the opening it presented, wondering if perhaps we could go for a walk on the beach. I wanted to take photos; I wanted to gain some kind of foothold on our situation.

It took him the length of the day to respond, and it wasn’t until that night, when he bought me a bourbon and everyone around the bar was distracted, that he leaned in with a time and place.

The next afternoon, he met me inside the dunes, concealed from the hotels’ and promenade’s view, the heavy grey sky draped around us. We walked north, away from the lives we’d flown in from—and it was so easy, supercharged by dopamine and enabled by solitude—to the edge of the world. This day, the edge of the world was an estuary where the river that flowed through the town ran headlong into the sea. Here, where gulls feed and ghost shrimp burrow, where the water is neither fresh nor salt, we stopped and stood, bodies pressed ankle to thigh to hip to hand to shoulder. Beneath layers of jean and cotton and fleece and Omni-Tech nylon, my skin ached for his. All around us, life adapted and thrived. I could not tell if the tide was in or out.

Our hands entangled, I told him what I’d told myself: I promised I’d be good. He closed his eyes against the mist and said, I promised that, too. We didn’t kiss then. We were, once again, by common moral definition, good. No lines were crossed, no boundaries breached. And yet, what runner wouldn’t understand this as a warmup? What sinner wouldn’t recognize the deal struck?

Our longing thickened and sparkled as we walked back, and though I left him at a cross street a block before the hotel so no one might spy us together, and though I walked with a straight back, the feral part of me was taking a long, deep breath, poised to spring.

There is a poignant intimacy that occurs during an affair. Almost anyone can recognize the seduction of forbidden love: pinked skin and rippled gooseflesh, shared secrets and whispers, that slight hitch each time the other enters the room. There is the adrenaline of the secret, the heart hammering and the hope, the just this once and the again. How much is too much, you might ask, and when do we stop? There is no answer.

The night he touched my distended belly after I jokingly confessed to eating the world’s biggest Reuben for dinner, I went back to my hotel room feeling full, and perhaps a bit self-satisfied: I would live up to my vow, I would. We’d crossed the halfway point. Piper had successfully landed on the other side of the Atlantic; this was as far apart as we’d ever been, and I was here, upholding my promise. I changed into my pajamas and washed my face, and it was close to midnight when I checked my email. There was one from him.

I can’t help but think: what if we just had one night together?

A slow heat spread through me. I could say yes; I could say no. I could say nothing. He was surrendering now and passing the power of decision to me. Which way would I run?

No matter how well-considered, no matter how heart-centered my decision, it is not easy to allow for the truth of our affair’s expression, for my clarity of spirit in this moment. What of Piper; what of Willa? Where was my loving-kindness, you will want to know. Where were my morals?

When an orb spider begins building a web, it pulls silk from a gland with its fourth leg. Using its opposite fourth leg, it produces several more silk strands, creating a balloon-like structure that attaches to the original strand. And then it waits. Eventually, a breeze comes along and catches the balloon, carrying that long line of silk to a nearby branch. The spider can feel the connection, and after a few tugs to assess the strength of the snag, it lays down more silk, and moves off toward another endpoint. The spider might do this up to twenty times, but it only needs seven true attachments. After, as I find on the Smithsonian website, “you no longer need to touch the ground, leaves, twigs, anything . . . you are in your own, arguably solipsistic, world.”

I hit reply.

I’ve been wondering the same.