When I started training for the Kalamazoo Half Marathon, I assumed that I with every new step on a ten mile run, I would hate my legs a little more, hate that I spent $50 on the registration fee and hate the women one step in front of me on the side walk. But instead, a long run gave me time distance from my on campus worries for enough time that I was ready to return home. On today’s ten-mile run, I spent the first mile thinking about homework. Would Pip and Estella get married in the end? I would find out in the 200 pages I had to read in Great Expectations that night. Once I could shake my to do list from my head, I used the next nine miles to think about why I didn’t confront Brett when he peed in my bed.
Brett studies math, but he is happiest when playing the saxophone in the college Jazz Band. I met him through a wet, drunken kiss at a summer party after I had been trying to leave for an hour. His lips caught mine in the middle of my thoughts about the injustice of women’s safety at night and my responsibility to be at the campus community garden at dawn. Brett’s kiss told me to forget about the morning, to take a deep breath in and stay a while.
It helps to think about moments like my first kiss from Brett in mile five of my ten mile run. My calves had started to cramp and it was up to me to convince myself it didn’t hurt. The idea of Brett’s kiss doesn’t rest in my chaotic thoughts without the memory of another drunken night with him that ended less romantically.
That night, he came over my house for a campus party already substantially drunk. He cornered me in the narrow hallway on the first floor and kissed me. He asked to go upstairs. It seemed like he need a bed more than anything else. I put him to bed with the intention of coming back later.
When I returned, he was out cold. I had to push him over to climb in. Lying in bed, listening to him breath, I began to think about what each kiss meant added together. I couldn’t figure out the math. Brett was the math major. I wanted to wake him up and ask him. I guess, it meant I would put him to bed like a baby. It meant I would kiss him in the morning. It meant…I was drifting off thinking about the two of us and I heard the squirting of the keg tap. No, I felt it. No, Brett was peeing in my bed. It hit my arm and I sprang out of bed, shocked. I grabbed a change of cloths and ran down the stairs and into the bathroom. When the bar of soap helped me reclaim my skin I crept into my housemate Molly’s room on the first floor.
“He peed in my bed,” I said still shocked and embarrassed to say it out loud for the first time.
“Peed in you bed?” as if she needed clarification. I clarified anyway.
“Peed in my bed.”
“Let’s think about it in the morning,” she said and I agreed. It was too much to take in tonight. What was there to do anyway?
I lay in her bed and tried to stop thinking about Brett wrapped in my urine soaked comforter, still sound asleep. I was directly beneath Brett and the piss, one floor below. I was habitually under Brett, under his control. This allowed me to take his kisses as a moment to stop thinking, to let go. Did it also mean that I had to clean up after him?
I’m brought back to mile seven with a cramp in my side. I should have drunk more water today. I should have eaten a better lunch. I should have taken better care of myself for the run. I thought about Pip and Estella again. I thought about the heartless Estella explaining her cruelness to dear old Pip.
“You must know,” said Estella .. “that I have no heart. I have no softness there, no-sympathy-sentiment-nonsense.” I thought about the first time Brett and I talked about being in a relationship. We sat beside each other on a campus bench and I said,
“I like you, but I don’t trust you.” He looked me in the eye and said, “I like you but I don’t trust me.”
“Well at least we agree,” I shrugged, confused.
“You don’t want to date me,” he continued.
“I’m not good at relationships.” I am Pip, aren’t I? I remembered thinking in my Victorian literature class. I hated that he told me what to think almost as much as I hated the idea that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted from him. We weren’t going to date. Six months from the day on my bench on the eighth mile of my run, was still living in this sentence. He likes me but he doesn’t trust himself.
“Sometimes they just don’t have a heart. They just don’t care,” I thought about my professor yelling about Estella. “We’ve all been in relationships like that before. We aren’t happy in them but we don’t leave them.” English is therapy. Running is therapy, I thought.
It was mile eight and my knee was bothering me. Just keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving. I took as second to focus on the spring around me. The most naïve, flower blubs where popping up with their young, pastel colors. It was a good time of the year to train for a half-marathon. There was a rejuvenating freshness in the air, a freshness that resolves complexities of the winter and fall.
“How are you feeling?” Ellen. Molly, my roommate that coaxed me into training asked. Her question made me realize that I hadn’t said anything in a while.
“I’m struggling,” I breathed out, “but we’re almost home. How are you doing?” I said, returning the mental favor.
“My legs are tight. Distract me,” she answered.
“I’ve been thinking about why I didn’t confront Brett when he peed in my bed,” I said. She laughed through her panting.
“You couldn’t! He would have told everyone and made you look dumb, or you would have had to sit him down and teach him a lesson like your mother. That is not your responsibility.” She was right. I didn’t want either of those roles, but I did want an apology. “Your problem is that you let him sleep in your bed to begin with,” she said rolling her eyes.
I applied Molly’s advice to the resolution of Pip and Estella’s relationship. The problem was that Charles Dickens wrote two endings. The ending widely published is a revised ending where the last scene closes on Pip and Estella holding hands as a sign of mutual understanding and friendship. In the last scene of the original ending, however, Estella is up in a carriage and Pip in down on the London street. Pip is still under Estella. Is it Pip or Estella’s movement in the hierarchy that creates the different dynamic?
Whether Molly was right or not, whether I should have confronted Brett or not, I was almost done running. I was close to home, close to our celebratory chocolate milk and close to a shower. We were only a few weeks shy of being prepared to run 13.1 miles with thousands of people and only a few months shy of graduation. Now running downhill with my driveway in sight I got a sense of lightness. Without a kiss, I took in a much-needed breath of spring oxygen.
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