It seems like my new friends here are determined not to let me go gently into that good fall of keeping chin-stroking office hours and toddling back to my house for a grilled cheese and soup. Let’s hunt down a new dive bar! Let’s go see a play rehearsal! Let’s join a local meeting about how to provide an appropriate community for our local sex offenders!

The new thing is: Let’s run 6.5 miles in a race next month! Sigh.

As I keep telling people, 6.5 miles is a lot of running for a fat girl. At this point, everyone makes nice high eye contact and proclaims, “Preposterous! I’ve never heard such a ridiculous description of a human body in all my life!” Ugh, no, we’re not having the “Am I rilly beautiful talk?” now; we’re having the “bodies moving through space at a certain rate for a particular distance” conversation. We’re having the “I’m going to die alone in the woods during this race!” conversation.

I did used to run, about 6-7 years ago, for a brief while that I recall fondly as the year when I vomited every day. Some things I got better at, like breathing and getting my guts to hold themselves together. One month I ran 127 miles. But back then, let’s remember, I was 25 and the neurons in my brain hadn’t fully mylenated. Once they did, I realized that all I talked about was running, all I thought about was running, and I was in an unspoken contest with the bulimic girl downstairs for who could spend more time per day puking. I didn’t want to live that way anymore.

So the puking: It turns out I don’t really experience pain in the normal way. I don’t know what the normal way is supposed to be, but it tells people, in a sane and predictable manner, that they’ve gone too far, right? No matter what happens to me, from tapping a table too hard to the day after oral surgery, pain is like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! oh no! ah! If I cut myself, I have no idea until I inspect the wound whether I’ve barely scraped the skin or sawed almost down to the bone. It’s just aaaaaaaah! oh no! either way.

When I run, it feels the same if I’m going slowly or quickly, short or far. I went for the first run in years a few weeks ago, and zipped through the first mile in a time that I still scarcely believe, it’s so fast. I was excited to do so well and thought about doing another, having stopped, and I realized my internal organs were about to leak out of my bodily cavities, having been pulverized by unaccustomed jostling. I was in horrible pain. I limped home, defeated by my own stupidity, and barely managed to draw a hot bath to pass out in. Never again, I thought.

This time, however, I’m running with some other people, who are good at keeping a slower pace and not being overly ambitious. When I’m running with them, I feel as if they’re killing me, making me do this bullshit that I don’t want to do, and fine, Jesus Christ, we’ll take a right up the hill assholes. But they’re saving me from myself, so I don’t get bored and tear off for home, only to barf on the threshold.

We’ll see if I make it up to 6.5 miles by a month from tomorrow. If you don’t hear from me soon after, you’ll know that I was the one the wolves decided was the easiest pickings.