Member-only story
Why Embark on a New Book When You’re Not Famous, Young, or Fabulously Cool?
Because if you’re born to write, it’s the one thing you ought to do.
I used to be a distance runner. On the estate where my dad lived, there was a miniature racetrack where he’d break horses. It was covered in grass and sand — one lap around was a quarter mile. For hours, I would run in circles. In the snow. When the rain came down in sheets. On the days in August where the humidity and heat threatened to swallow me whole. Newton’s Second Law of Motion: force equals mass times acceleration.
One evening, my dad stood at the edge of the track to watch me run. I had a Discman and I remember complaining about the music skipping. We walked back to his small apartment in the dark, and the only thing I remember from that night was him saying that I needed to stop running.
The next day there I was, on the track again. Ancestral in my misery. My mother vanished into the ether, college friends slumbered back to that from which they’d come — I was alone. Although I emerged from the womb fully-formed, forever bracing for impact, when adulthood finally came I didn’t know what to do with it. And although I’d grown up riding the subways, the city that had been my home felt foreign and impenetrable.
