Out on the flat foot down thudding over tarmac road and the black frigid night for hours. I didn’t listen to music – I listened to the rubbish of my brain shift about until my muscles below burned so much I outran thought, and I kept running. And I ran to keep from— I ran into cold and hedges and nothingness. The lone buses with the anti-junkie lighting beaming blue and cold. I puffed and ran, dodging bins – cars – some early-arriving tourists wheeling their bags. Drunks clustered on one of the bridges – I always forget street names here, they don’t seem to matter against the age of them – raising their cans at me as I fled past. I turned hard right and let my legs go long and unkinked on the downward stretch of the centre. I passed a woman out late walking her dog – startled her with my heavy panting, but was gone too quickly to apologise, if I even could have spoken. I got so thirsty I could think of nothing else but dropping down – falling and staying there. I licked salt off my arm, I listened to my pounding exhalation – I stopped and bought water, drank it messily, ran on. I ran towards the dull shape of a hill – heading for the path up it – but got confused in the dark and wound up running along towards the cliffs. Didn’t care. Couldn’t care. Kept running. At a turn in the path I heaved and threw up. I couldn’t remember what I had for dinner – If I’d had dinner. I shouted once and ran on. At the top of the path I saw the plateau of the cliff going out in front of me and the lights of the city below like a city below a transparent sea. Not like the cliff. Not like here, where the sea is uninhabited, I think, but softer if I had dived in. If I do. If I stayed for dawn there, then, I’d have been late for work – I just lay down for a while feeling my chest exploding and the wires of my muscles burn and overhead I could see the woollen sky come down closer and closer like it wanted to get a look at this flea – this ant – in the wet grass. I felt like my heart was going to crush itself. I closed my eyes and gasped in and out. Time went black and I didn’t know anything.
When I came to myself I felt both better and worse – worn out but rejuvenated – real and unreal. I crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked out, squinting. Where was I in all the world? I had no thoughts, I wasn’t myself. As earlier with Daniel, when I’d worried I would accidentally forget myself – forget all my established sexuality and my desires up until this point in life and try to kiss him, I was struck by worry – that I didn’t know myself – that I had no reason to be here and then some close and dangerous reason would present itself to me. The most obvious being that I’d run up here in the night to try to throw myself off the crags. I crawled over a little further, feeling the folded edges of the bare rocks jutting out. If I kept wriggling forward, this desire would shake hands with gravity and fulfil itself swiftly on the same path far below on which I’d run earlier. I gasped – a noise like shock and a laugh – I didn’t want to die, I hadn’t thought to do it. I hadn’t thought I wanted anything, just to run. I wanted to be held.
My eye still felt sore and I rubbed it – rubbing more dirt into both of them in the process. I winced and said, ‘For fuck’s sake Tommy,’ and pulled back from the edge and rubbed and rubbed away. Eventually I sat back and thought at last.
‘I didn’t come here to do anything but run,’ I said. ‘Anything else is just coincidence.’
I don’t know if I’d thought how easy it is to make mistakes just because you stop thinking and let your body go where it wants. That was astounding to me. I’d always thought my body was a pretty reliable self-attainment machine. And it did do then what it was meant to – my eyes cleared themselves, my heart wasn’t about to pop. I sat on the cliff, weak but strong, got up slowly and walked down again. In the grass at the foot of the hill there was a huge puddle spread out, with the orange glow of the sky reflected in it. I came to it. I stood over it and saw my body in the dimness. The rest of the city pulled back – there was only grass and sky and myself.
‘Come closer, here,’ it said.
I was standing right over it. No thoughts. Slowly I lowered myself and tied my shoelaces. No thinking. I couldn’t. I was mostly blankness, dehydrated, a dip in blood sugar, a couple of nights of no sleep – this is how close we are to becoming animal ghosts of ourselves. I leaned over the puddle and looked at the face in it. It was not my face, not my body. I got up quickly, making no noise and walked on. Hands on the back of my head. Home to bed. It must have taken me forty minutes to get back, but turn me upside down and shake me out, you won’t find where those forty minutes have gone.
The End of Being Tired
There’s
