Still Running

I count my steps because counting is a noise, and noise is what I need. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. I say the numbers inside myself where they echo against whatever passes for thought in a place like this, and the counting fills half a second, and then the silence rushes back the way water fills a hole dug in wet sand, and I start again. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. I keep walking. Walking is movement and movement is the other thing I need, the twin engine of my whole life: noise and motion, motion and noise, the two legs I have walked on since before I knew what I was walking from.

The grey gives me nothing. No wall, no horizon, no variation. I walk and the walking produces no change because the grey does not change. It is the same in front of me as behind me, the same above as below. If I am making progress, there is no marker to prove it. If I am going in circles, the circles have no circumference. The only evidence that I am moving at all is the feeling in my legs, which is not quite a feeling in a body that is not quite a body, but which is close enough to movement that I can use it, can pour myself into it the way I poured myself into six cities in six years, couch to couch, bar to bar, bed to bed, always gone before the quiet came.

The quiet is here. It has been here since I opened my eyes in this place, and it is not the quiet of a room where the music has paused. It is the quiet of a room where music has never existed. Total. Lidless. A silence so complete it has a pressure to it, a physical weight against the inside of my skull, the way deep water presses against the ears of someone who has gone too far down. I have been afraid of many things in twenty-four years, most of them the wrong things, but this is the right thing, this is the thing the fear was always pointed at: silence without escape. Silence with no volume knob. Silence with no next song, no next city, no next drink, no next body warm in a bed at two in the morning, nothing between me and the sound that is not a sound, the sound that lives under all the other sounds, the sound I have spent my whole life learning not to hear.

So I walk. I walk fast and count my steps and try to make the counting loud enough to fill the gap, and the gap swallows the counting and opens its mouth for more.

I try singing. I open my mouth and push a melody out, a song from the concert, the last concert, the one Naomi drove us home from in the rain. I remember the bass, the woman's voice curling around the edges of words. I remember my body in the crowd, arms loose, eyes shut, disappearing into the beat the way you disappear into a pill, because disappearing is the only skill I ever really learned and I learned it so well it became my whole self, so that the self is the disappearing and the disappearing is the self and there is nothing underneath but the thing I will not look at.

The song dies in the grey. The notes come apart in my mouth, fraying into separate sounds that have no relationship to each other, and the sounds thin and flatten and go, and the silence is back, fuller than before, as if my singing fed it. The grey absorbs my voice the way a sponge absorbs water, without resistance, without even the dignity of refusal. No echo. No resonance. No surface for the sound to bounce from. The absence of echo means the grey goes on forever, or the grey goes on until meaning runs out, which amounts to the same thing.

I stop singing. I keep walking.

The thing at the edge will not leave.

I do not look at it. Looking at it would be a kind of stopping, and stopping is the thing I do not do. But I can feel it the way I could feel Naomi watching me from the front seat of the car, the way I could feel the hum in the dark apartment when the power went out: a warmth, a displacement, a presence aimed in my direction. Specific. Patient. Not angry, not demanding, not even asking. Just there, the way a lit window is there when you are walking in the cold, not calling to you, not opening its door, just glowing, steady, visible from blocks away.

I walk away from it. I turn my back and pick a direction, any direction, the way I picked cities: not toward something but away from the last place, always away, always the leaving rather than the arriving, because arriving means being somewhere and being somewhere means being still and being still means hearing it.

The nearness does not chase me. This is the thing I cannot understand. Everything I have ever run from has had the decency to chase, to give the running a reason, to be the thing behind me that justified the speed. Boys who wanted more than I could give chased, and I outran them. Jobs that asked me to commit chased, and I quit before they caught me. The chasing was the contract: I run, it follows, and the following proves the running was necessary, which means I never have to stop and ask what I am running from.

But the nearness does not follow. I walk and walk and walk and when I have walked until the walking is its own kind of pain, I look up, and the nearness is where it was. Not behind me, not beside me, not ahead of me. At the edge. At every edge. As if the edge of the grey is not a place but a quality, and the quality is: here. Here, the way a heartbeat is here, not chasing the blood but already in it, already distributed through every capillary and chamber before you thought to look.

I cannot outrun something that is not running. I cannot put distance between myself and a thing that is already wherever I am going. The chase I am built for is the one thing this place will not give me.

Every city was the same. A new name for the same noise. Portland, eleven days. Tucson, sixteen. A bag I hadn't unpacked from the last place and a phone number given to me by someone at a bar and a mattress on a floor and the quick bright surface I kept polished and turned outward so that nobody looked past it. I was the girl who was always leaving, and the leaving looked like freedom, and freedom looked like me walking into a new apartment with a duffel bag, and nobody ever said where are you going because nobody was close enough to notice I was gone.

Naomi noticed. She opened the door and looked at me for three seconds and saw through the surface like it was glass, and what she did with the seeing was the thing nobody else had done: she did not comment on it. She just said yes and handed me a key and showed me the smallest room in the house, the room I chose because I would never be in it, because rooms are places I pass through on my way to the next room, and Naomi understood this and let me pass.

I loved her for it. I love her, present tense, wherever she is now in the grey. I love Micah, who asks nothing and offers his quiet the way some people offer their coat. I love the house on Birch Street, three doors down from the laundromat, the couch and the terrible television and the coffee I drank too much of, too late, because even the coffee was a kind of noise, a chemical hum I could stack on top of the other hum to drown it out.

The grey has no cities. No bars, no phones, no pills, no concerts, no recorded rain played on a loop to cover the sound of actual rain, no couch, no key, no door. The grey has taken every piece of driftwood I ever clung to and left me in the water, and the water is the silence, and the silence is the thing I have been swimming from since I was old enough to reach for the volume knob, and I am swimming now, in the grey, without water, without arms, swimming in the only way I know: by refusing to be still.

The kitchen floor comes back.

The memory arrives the way all memories arrive in this place: unbidden, fully formed, carrying the weight of the original moment as if no time has passed, as if the grey is the kitchen floor and the kitchen floor is the grey and the distance between them was always thinner than I thought.

I was nineteen. The power had been out for two days. A storm, a transformer down, the whole block dark. I had burned through my phone battery in the first six hours, playing music until the screen went black and the last song stopped mid-note, and the stopping of that note was the sound of every exit closing at once. No phone. No speakers. No television. Just the apartment and the rain and the dark.

By the second night I was on the floor. My back against the cabinets, the linoleum cold through my jeans, and the silence pressing in from every side like hands, and inside the silence the hum, the thing that lives below hearing, the frequency I had kept buried under layers of sound for so many years I had forgotten it was there. Except I hadn't forgotten. You don't forget the thing you spend your life running from. You learn its shape by negative space, the way you learn the shape of a hole by the things you throw into it: every song, every drink, every city, every stranger's bed, all of them falling and falling and never hitting the bottom, and the not-hitting-the-bottom is how you know the hole is real.

The hum rose. It filled the apartment the way the grey fills this place, from the bottom up, silent and total, and I felt it not in my ears but in my bones, in the cage of my ribs, in the place behind my sternum where something lives that I have never named. And the something said, or did not say, or was: look. Stop running and look at what is under this.

I did not look. I got up. I put on my coat and walked eight blocks in the rain to a bar with a generator and I sat in the noise and the yellow light and drank until the hum was gone, and when the power came back I lay on the couch and turned on every device I owned and let the sound cover me, and the covering was safety, and the safety was a lie I told my body so my body would stop shaking.

The grey is the kitchen floor. I understand this now, in the place below understanding where the body knows things the mind refuses to process. The grey is the apartment with the power out, stretched to the size of forever, and the hum is not a hum anymore because there is nothing between me and it. The hum is a presence. The hum is the thing at the edge. The hum was always the thing at the edge, and every noise I ever made was a hand held up against a light that was trying, gently, to show me my own face.

I do not want to see my face. Not the real one, not the one underneath the smile and the quick laugh and the girl who is fun and easy and never stays long enough to be seen. The underneath face is the one that sits on kitchen floors in the dark and has a question in it so large and so old that I built my entire life around never asking it.

I keep walking.

Time does something here that it does not do in the living world. It stretches without markers, pools without edges. I do not know how long I have been walking. I do not know how many steps I have taken or how many times I have turned my back on the nearness and walked until the walking hurt and then looked up and found the nearness at the edge, unchanged, patient, warm.

In the dying moment, something saw me. The memory will not be replaced. In the last instant of the car, the silence opened, and inside the silence was a knowing, and the knowing was aimed at me, personally, precisely. It knew the thing under all of it. The thing on the kitchen floor. The thing the music was for.

And it wanted me anyway.

That was the part I could not bear. Not the knowing, though the knowing was terrible. Not the exposure, though the exposure was worse than being naked, worse than being caught. It was the wanting. The knowing met me and saw everything and then reached for me the way you reach for something precious, something you have been looking for, and the reaching said: I know what is under the silence, and I want you, and the wanting has nothing to do with whether you are good or clean or fixed.

I flinched. I turned. The turning was the fastest, most practiced motion of my life, faster than every midnight departure, every bag packed in the dark. I turned from the knowing the way I turned up the volume when the power came back, and the turning was not a decision. It was a reflex, the deepest one, written into me by twenty-four years of practice: when the silence gets close, run. When someone sees you, leave. When the thing under the noise begins to show itself, fill the air with something, anything, before the showing is complete.

And I woke here. In the grey. In the silence. In the place where there is nothing to fill the air with and nowhere to leave to and no volume knob and no next city and no next song.

I woke still running. And I am still running now.

There is a moment, or a stretch, or an age, where I forget to count my steps.

It happens without warning. I am walking and counting and the counting is thin but the counting is mine and then it stops, not because I chose to stop but because some mechanism inside me gives way, some spring wound too tight for too many years releases, and the counting drops out of me the way the last note dropped out of my phone when the battery died: mid-number, mid-motion, gone.

And the silence is total.

I panic. The panic is old, familiar, the same panic that sent me from the kitchen floor to the bar in the rain. The body, or whatever I have here in place of a body, floods with the chemistry of flight: move, now, the silence is touching you and if you let it touch you for one more second you will have to feel what it is carrying and what it is carrying will end you.

I run. Actually run, not walk, not pace. I run the way you run from a fire, from the thing in the dream that is always behind you and never falls back. My feet, which are not feet, hit the ground, which is not ground, and the impact makes no sound, and the soundlessness is the worst part, because even running is silent here, even the body in full flight produces nothing to fill the gap, and I am sprinting in a vacuum, legs pumping, and the silence swallows every sound I make and remains undisturbed, vast, patient, whole.

I run for a long time. I run the way I once ran through cities, through years. The running is the only prayer I know: not yet, not here, not this, give me one more corner to turn, one more song to play, one more exit, please, I am not ready for the silence, I have never been ready, let me run.

The nearness does not answer the prayer. It does not block my path or throw up a wall. It lets me run. It lets me run the way a parent lets a child run circles in a yard, not because the running will get the child anywhere but because the running is something the child needs to do before the child can stop, and the stopping will come when the running has spent itself, and the knowing of this is not cruelty but patience, and the patience is a kind of love so large it can afford to wait.

I do not want it to be love. Love is the thing people say when they want you to stay, and staying is the thing that kills. Love is the boy in Portland who said don't go with his hand on my wrist, and I went anyway, because the hand on my wrist was a lock and the lock was on a door and the door was to a room and the room was quiet, and I cannot be in a quiet room. Love is Naomi's eyes on me, worried, watching, holding the door without making me walk through it. Love is a sound I have heard from the outside, through walls, the way you hear music from a passing car: a snatch of melody, gone before you can learn the song.

The nearness is not asking me to stay. It makes no demand. It blocks no path. It simply is, the way the silence simply is, already here, already there, already at the place I have not yet reached, not because it is fast but because it does not need to move, because it is not a thing in a place but the thing the place is made of, the way heat is what a fire is made of, and you cannot outrun the thing the world is made of because there is nowhere outside it.

The running slows. Not because I choose to slow but because the slowing is what happens when you have been running long enough, when the fuel burns down, when the legs say enough and mean it.

I am walking again. Then standing. Then standing and not counting, not singing, not listing street names or the names of boys whose last names I never learned. I am standing in the grey in the silence and the silence is touching me and I am not dying of it.

This is new. This is the thing I never tested, the hypothesis I never ran: what if the silence does not kill? What if the kitchen floor was not the edge of an abyss but the edge of something else, and the something else is what I flinched from, and the flinching was not survival but refusal, and the refusal is the grey, and the grey is the distance I put between myself and the thing I would not hear?

The nearness is here. Not closer, not louder, not pressing in. Just here, the way it has always been here, the way it was here (I understand now with a clarity that feels like falling) in the concert when the bass was loudest and my eyes were shut and I thought I had disappeared. I had not disappeared. I had covered myself with noise the way a child pulls a blanket over her head and calls it hiding, and the thing she is hiding from is still in the room, standing beside the bed, patient, waiting for the blanket to come down.

I am shaking. The way I shook on the kitchen floor before I got up and walked to the bar. The animal recognition that the walls are down and the air is getting in and the air carries something in it, some knowing, some question so old that the asking of it is the sound the silence makes when you finally stop drowning it out.

The question is not what have you done. I was braced for that. The question is older and deeper, has nothing to do with what I have done and everything to do with what I am.

The question is the hum. The question is the thing that lives under the silence. The question is: Quinn, who are you when you stop?

I do not know. I have never known. I have been motion without a mover, noise without a source, a running that forgot what started it, and the forgetting was the point, and the point was the running, and the running was the life, and the life is over, and I am standing in the grey, and the question is here, and I cannot turn the volume up.

The nearness does not press the question. It holds it the way it holds everything: openly, gently, the way you hold a door for someone who has not yet decided to walk through. The door is the question and the question is the silence and the silence is the space where the answer lives, and the answer requires a kind of stillness I have never risked, a kind of staying I have never practiced, a kind of being-present that is the opposite of everything I am.

I am not ready. The not-ready is as true as anything I have ever known about myself. I am standing in the grey and the silence is touching me and I am not dying of it, but I am not ready, and the not-ready is its own kind of running, a running done in place, a refusal to sit down on the kitchen floor and let the hum finish what it started.

I start walking again. Slower this time. The steps are heavier and the counting does not come back and the silence walks beside me like a companion I did not choose, and the nearness is at the edge, warm, patient, carrying something I will not look at, something that feels, at the very limit of feeling, like the outline of a name.

My name. Known. Held. Not condemned.

I keep walking. But the walking is slower now, and the silence is closer, and the exits are fewer, and somewhere in the grey, in the long unmeasured time of this place, the running is beginning to cost more than I have left to spend.