The Marathons

The first marathon was run by a sad, ruined woman who could barely look the finish line in the eye. The second marathon was run by a woman still sad, but with a new determination to improve, not be ruined. That second woman raced against the first woman, and won. The third marathon was run by a woman with platinum blond hair, armed with a false sense of happiness, that pink and frilly feeling a person has when she’s made it out of the hole and onto neutral ground. That third woman beat the second woman, but not by enough to satisfy her. The fourth marathon was run by a woman with pixie-short hair, a woman who experimented with lighter shades of lipstick and bare shades of eyeshadow, attempting to blend in and not be seen at a time when she was feeling a few real feelings—true regret, but also true joy—for the first time and wasn’t yet sure what to do with them. The fifth and sixth marathons were run by a woman with a bob haircut, angled sharply at her chin, a woman one might assume to have been a mother at some point, because mothers wear bobs. She ran those races as a mother, thinking about her children the entire way. Weeping halfway through, not over how she had failed but over what she had done right, over finally acknowledging what she had done right. The seventh, eighth, and ninth marathons were run by the woman as she appeared now, during her tenth marathon—red hair, shoulder length, pulled into a relaxed ponytail, no makeup, her face nothing but eyes, a nose, and a mouth, all used solely for their intended purpose. She still couldn’t sleep at night, but she had become OK with that—more time to knit or do puzzles or read something that challenged her.

The woman knew that, eventually, she would arrive at a stage when she could no longer beat her year-younger self. But she hoped that, by that point, she’d be able to walk alongside any of those women; even hold hands with the saddest one.