I run through autumn crisp with sunlight towards the I-90 bridge, my watch buzzing to let me know that I have already run one mile, my feet slapping at the pavement as I wind around the north end of Beacon Hill and down through Daejeon Park. In autumn I feel dread and belonging as the weather falls towards winter, cyclical death. It is only my second autumn since moving back to Seattle, within half an hour's drive of where I grew up, after nearly a decade of living in the Midwest where I struggled out of teenagehood and into my twenties. As the path curves past the turnoff that would take me down to Rainier Ave, I unite with the freeway, separated from the speeding weight of semitrucks only by a low barrier. I push up the short hill and along 23rd, and then, as I pause my watch and hit the button that cues the crosswalk, I see a woman running towards me at the farthest edge of the path between Jimi Hendrix and Sam Smith parks. She's light on her feet, but tense, taut, and I feel that she's familiar.
The light changes; I cross. As we approach each other, I see short hair turning to silver, pale freckled skin, small features. She looks at me with self-conscious curiosity. I know her—she's me. There, in the highway lid park, is me, older, stronger, quicker, touching her wrist to pause her running watch, looking intent. I hear her voice and it's mine but not mine. It's reedy and nasal, like the voice on the cassette tape recordings I made as a kid in that house twenty miles north of this spot that I would listen back to with my brother, pleasantly horrified at the disconnected self in the speakers.
Stop, she is saying. She is close enough now that, if I wanted to, I could take a step forward and touch her. I realize that I have slowed, and I decide to keep going—I have been dizzy for days, or, more accurately, feel like fireworks are exploding in my brain and that the world is swimming around me or I am swimming in it but swimming doesn't dampen the sparks, so I no longer trust my brain, especially when I am slamming it, one foot after another, against such hard surfaces.
I don't think I know you, I say, and I keep running.
She turns and runs alongside me. She had been headed west; now she goes east with me. All the trees around us are leafless except the strawberry trees with their dark green leaves and obscenely soft red fruit split open and wet on the concrete. Not the strawberries of grocery store produce sections, these are perfectly round and when they break they reveal a mucus-yellow flesh inside. I notice my double deliberately slowing to meet my pace.
I do think you know me, she says, or, I know you.
I don't respond. A couple is pushing a toddler in a stroller past us.
Look, she says, unrelenting, I'm Katie. I'm running in Portland, along the river. It's November, it's 2044.
I should have been afraid, and maybe I was, but I was so afraid of everything, every calorie, every interaction, even vegetables–absurd as it seems–that I was also powerful then, in some sense the most powerful I had ever been, the tyrant god with full and complete control over its one domain: my body.
Just the day before, I remarked to my girlfriend that everyone in Portland seemed to be living the life they had dreamed of. On a recent trip, we'd seen beautiful people eating beautiful brunches in the weak weekend sunlight, people with beautiful houses and beautiful children and beautiful dogs. But I ruin beautiful fantasies, and surely, I think, my older self has ruined Portland, too.
No, I say. It's 2017 and I'm running on the I-90 trail towards the Mount Baker tunnel and the bridge.
We run in sync, which disturbs me greatly. I want to reach out and touch her, I want to ask her what pronouns she uses, I want to know if she has new tattoos.
How are you here? I ask.
Maybe you're dreaming, she says.
Maybe you are, I say.
She looks at me shrewdly and I know that she's measuring the circumference of my biceps with her gaze because I do the same to my friends or strangers. She says, You're thin. I'd forgotten.
I flush with pleasure at her words. She is right. I was, in fact, very thin, and I wasn't yet at the bottom of my submission.
How did you get to—your age? I say. The subtraction is unwieldy. I add, How do I know that it's you?
She takes a while to speak, gathering her thoughts like gathering flowers, unhurried in discovery. We are about to enter the tunnel, which I hate. It's almost a quarter mile long, with shivery yellow lights and graffitied-over murals that create the illusion of many people in the empty tunnel, painting and defacing and re-painting. The length and creepiness of the tunnel is only marginally offset by the security cameras every couple hundred feet. Everything echoes.
Well, she says, echoing. I can tell you things that no one else would know? Like, in the filing cabinet in the living room of that apartment—still on Beacon Hill?
I nod.
There’s a too-flashy opal necklace that belonged to Grandma and that I wore—you wore—at her funeral. It’s the only time you’ve worn it. You keep your passport in your underwear drawer no matter where you live, because you always have underwear and because that’s where our parents used to keep their cash, in white legal-sized envelopes. You don't like habits or rules. You were pleased that I told you you look thin.
If I'm dreaming you'd know all of this anyway.
She smiles the smile I make when I know I've won an argument. Yes, but I know your dreams don't make this much sense.
So you think you're the one dreaming?
Maybe you're hallucinating, she says, trying to hurt me. Malnutrition and all.
We run in silence. I am surprised that she doesn’t keep asking questions. I am unable to keep from poking at a topic if I think that I am right. If I think that I am right, I push until I get the other person to admit how right I am. She must have learned silence in the twenty-five years that separate us.
So how low will my weight get? I ask.
She glances over again as we explode out of the pedestrian tunnel into the light and run, fast feet slapping, down the hill that curls around the opening of the I-90 car tunnel and towards the bridge.
You’ll survive, she says.
Will I? I say. You’re probably a fantasy. Odds are I’m not going to make it to fifty.
That silence again as my heart rate goes up up up. It’s good that we’re running downhill; it’s the only thing leaving me breath.
I remember now. You’re in the period of your life where you’re obsessed with that idea about the odds of living—what is it again?
Another old trick of mine: making the other person say it out loud.
I recite, If I’ve been thinking about killing myself daily, since I was ten, what are the odds that I’ll live to fifty?
You want someone to actually calculate it, she says. A mathematician.
My throat is tight and I work to keep my breathing even. I can’t get my thoughts together.
So what happens?
You’ll grow older, she says.
Just over two miles from my apartment, we reach the bridge where we are running slowly down, barely noticing the slope, until the water is only ten feet away from the sidewalk’s edge underneath the railing. We are floating. There is nothing holding the bridge in place except either end where it connects to land; there is nothing above it and nothing below it. Engineers can’t secure it to the bottom of the lake because it’s too deep and the surface is too slippery, silty, made of the glacial clay we live on.
I want to ask about my girlfriend, what happens with us, and I want to ask about the woman I think I’m in love with, and I want to ask if I will leave my job where my boss is a bully, and I want to ask if I will ever publish my writing, and I want to ask if I will ever adopt a dog, and I don’t want to ask if I will ever stop counting steps calories the circumference of my waist pounds my heartbeat. Instead, we run without speaking against the roar of the traffic and the long burp each time a vehicle drives over the grates. The water is bright from the clear sky. I can see Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker, and Glacier, each of which wear early snow.
How far are you going? she asks, pointing at her watch to make sure I understand even with the noise.
I hold up three fingers, meaning I will turn at three miles, totaling six. It isn’t long until my watch chimes and I turn without signaling to her. She spins and catches me, pretending to race and making herself laugh. She is stronger than me and I am annoyed. Facing west, the water looks black. It is so close. As we head back uphill, I slow, and she glances at me and matches my pace. It’s hard to keep running. For a while, she talks about her bridge in her time and space: the Steel Bridge.
This feels like time’s touching itself, she says into the noise, changing subjects. I was back in Seattle a few weeks ago and when we passed Beacon Hill on I-5, I looked up at that big white house—it’s still there—and I could feel what it was like to be alone and afraid in that basement apartment, but I could also feel the joy of re-committing to life.
I think for a moment. She said we. I say, How long will I be alone?
Not too long.
Tell me what happens. Are you happy? What’s your life like?
She shakes her head. For a split second I think the head shake means her life is terrible—but she’s wearing nice workout clothes and she’s strong and she gives off an aura of clarity and resilience. But I know I create effective facades, and perhaps that’s the aura I give off, even now.
It’s not bad, she says. But I’m not going to tell you.
Okay then, I say. If I’m dreaming of you to save me or perform an intervention or inspire a ‘re-commitment to life’ then why are you dreaming of me?
Maybe I’m not.
But maybe you are.
By the time you get back here, to this dream or whatever, you’ll understand.
I feel like she’s bullshitting me, and I say so.
Sure, she says. It feels like we’re separate, but we’re not.
Do you miss me?
I’m not nostalgic, she says, too sure of herself.
My irritation and curiosity are at odds; I want to be alone, unwatched, so that I can walk and breathe, but I want to know more.
You’re nostalgic, I spit between breaths. You have to be, to see me.
Maybe, she says generously. I do that too, give an opening where I don’t actually feel one, just to get the listener to keep listening. I guess I do still worry about going crazy, from time to time.
And the world?
Oh, that I definitely shouldn’t tell you. No spoilers.
I love spoilers, I say.
We do, she says. Don’t we.
At least tell me—do you live in Portland?
She doesn’t answer but watches a seagull gliding motionless on the wind.
I don’t remember, are you still young enough to believe you don’t have family history? That you’re immune to any kind of legacy?
No, I say, I know those things.
I’m lying. Suddenly I feel like a child for the first time since she started running alongside me. I think I’m weak compared to her, physically and emotionally and mentally. If I wasn’t already red and sweaty, I would have flushed with anger. I don’t know what she’s trying to imply about my family or my legacy, I don’t know what she knows that I don’t, or if she’s just talking generally about my whiteness, with no particular ethnic heritage and no love of what lineage I do know.
Why are you making me feel bad about myself? You know I do that on my own.
Then she says something that sticks with me even after the afternoon’s events fade to an uncomfortable hazy memory. I refuse to think of that afternoon as a turning point, or meaningful in any way, and perhaps out of stubbornness I continue to actively disappear for several months. Yet, each time I run that path I think of her and I can’t outrun the memory. I remember what she said, and I remember: the water was black and the city was stunning and the bottom of Lake Washington was so far away, so soft.
On the way back, the noise isn’t over until we exit the tunnel, which buzzes from the lights and the watery rumble of the highway below us and behind us. I don’t see her leave, but I know she is gone.
As I near five miles, alone, I pass strollers and grocery carts covered with tarps, holding the things that make up a life—stoves, windbreakers, bottles. The belongings are in the green space closest to 23rd, because the encampments further along have been cleared recently. After the sweep, I had seen a sign taped to the railing with a name and that person’s new address. Next to the handwritten sign was an official piece of paper announcing the date and time that they would be evicted from the otherwise unused patch of earth they had claimed. Even if she was still with me, she wouldn’t see the rawness of life lived in the open. She would see the Willamette River, would right now be running in a pretty neighborhood, now returning to her warm and lively home. I think she would tell me that I am implicated in these lives lived outside, under the canopy of short cedar trees. I think she should have told me about this secret history that ties the number of calories I burned on that run to the number of people living on the streets to the number of cedar trees felled in the state by my ancestors to the cubic feet of water my body would displace if I jumped into Lake Washington. She should have given me the equation, I think, because without it, I don’t know where to start or when to stop.
I will go back up to the park, up to the intersection at 12th and the Jose Rizal Bridge, up past the lookout where I will glimpse the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, and the final stretch up to the apartment—my girlfriend will still be on the couch, still watching TV. My return is all uphill.
Katie Kalahan (she/they) lives in Massachusetts and has roots in Seattle and St. Louis. Katie holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing and English Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis. Their work is published in Crosscut, Witness Magazine, and Split Lip Magazine, among others.
Photo by Zac Ong