The finish line is in your sight.

You’re short of breath but that seems like a concern from an earlier time from which you’re now far removed. You’re still breathless but not in any sense where you desperately draw breaths trying to force oxygen into even deeper recesses of your lungs. In fact, it’s like you’ve stopped breathing altogether, or rather it’s facile to distinguish your self from your breath. Your body is in a hypoxic state, trying desperately to flood your muscles with oxygen and flush the lactic acid away, but the interval between an inhale and an exhale where you’ve lived your entire life has long since disappeared; you’re in a constant state of breath, you’re the air itself.

Your feet are leaden and heavy and there is a dull fatigue that has crept its way up to your thighs. The tarmac shoots sharp knives up your achilles into your calves as you stride and move the earth itself underneath your feet. This is pain that you’ve grown familiar with over the past few hours as you established a symbiotic relationship with the road - your stride is a violent ritual sacrifice of energy to the ground, and in return, the ground propels you forward. This game of attrition has you weathered at your roots, and your feet now belong to the ground, you’re the ground itself.

Some time ago, some approximation of your self, marshalled itself and decided to set out on a course. One foot in front of the other till you decided the feet had reached equilibrium of station. But those notions are drowned out by the resonant harmony of the ringing in your head. You set out to see yourself across a chasm, but it now feels as if you’re plotting a route right into the heart of the chasm itself. The entirety of your self is concentrated at the very tip of the most forward part of your nose as you tilt forward into yourself, into the next step. Your mind dissolves, you are the finish line, just moments away from actualising itself.

You cross the line, and your hand motions itself towards your watch to press ‘STOP’. The dull pain in your legs and the fire in your lungs are doused by the rising jubilation flooding outwards from your core to the fringes of your body. You look at your watch and see the superposition of time and space - distance, pace, splits - and bask in the afterglow.

You’re back home, under the covers. There is now a void. You see your watch once again - distance, pace, splits - the glow is a little more distant, and then again, more distant. Some part of you registers that it’s a perverse approximation of the self you inhabited in those moments. In hitting ‘STOP’, you find yourself in mid-chrysalis, your being interrupted.

You find yourself at at the start line.