I remember I was running on the side of a 4 lane road, contra to the direction of the traffic, as was my routine, recently inculcated in the times of a global pandemic driven lockdown. The road was familiar to me; I knew of its intersections, its obtrusions, where it was broken and its protrusions (read speed breakers); Only now, on this cold January morning, it was shrouded in a thick blinding blanket of white. The sun would have risen, by my calculations of the time, but was only capable of rendering enough light to meet the accepted distinction between night and day. The visibility was a few metres at best, narrowing down to a metre or less in places. In this four dimensional ever expanding and contracting vacuum engulfed by the eerie nothingness of white, I ran, but I was not alone. The apparent solitariness of my endeavour was in fact a misdirection, a facade for the naive bystander who could see my silhouette trudging along through the translucent milkiness. I was accompanied, in that tiny little enclosure, by my mind, which was running at a pace matching mine. The only sound was of the fluorescent heels of my runners meeting the asphalt at an angle, a continuous ‘thump’ ‘thump’ ‘thump', which, for the mind became the second, the minutest human comprehensible unit of time, in this new dimension. The thumping was complimented, in tandem, by my breath, maintaining an orderly rhythm of breathing in for every two thumps, and breathing out for the one following. These sounds were intrinsically a part of this dimension, so they amounted to nothingness, silence, for it is a relative concept; a silence of one, is at times noise for another. This silence was at times broken by sounds, some familiar, other alien for there were no visual cues to aid with comprehension. A bird cuckooed somewhere on the right - there must be tree where it perched, or it must be sitting on the power line running parallel to the road, a bark in the distance, of a grown Indian breed by the sounds of it, a horn beeped elsewhere. As we made progress, my mind and I, a darker shade of white, bordering to a light grey, manifested in the white ahead. It was catching a darker shade of grey, by the ‘thump’, as the mind rummaged through the memories of familiarity, to give meaning to this darkening shadow. The shadow was now almost a silhouette. Could it be a human, a cow, a dog, a vehicle, a human on a vehicle, a dog with its human? A car, a bike, a tractor maybe? No, it couldn’t be a vehicle, I would’ve definitely heard the gurgle of the engine, and noticed headlights and the hazards blinking? And it was definitely smaller to be a truck that didn’t have any of these lights. By this time in my run, by my estimate, I should be next to the cow shed, had some cattle made their way onto the road? The mind was now sprinting much faster than I was, and I had considerably slowed down my pace, but surprisingly we still ran parallel to each other; it was interesting how the mind and I defied the rules of physics in this little vacuum. The silhouette had rendered solid form by now, dark grey in colour, so I could definitely make out that it was a human, it had to be. Was it a girl, a boy, a man, a lady? Old, young, of what demographics remained a mystery. The mind, as it so often does, painted this outline with a brush of anticipatory familiarity. Was it the girl I so wanted to meet, that I’d met the other day. It was plausible, was it not? Probably she’d come to meet? It is early in the morning, sure, but maybe, just maybe? A surprise? Or was it that friend that I hadn’t talked to in years, maybe he’s moved in the vicinity, the build of the outline seemed similar, or what the mind remembered from a few years ago; He had mentioned that he owned a place in the city, could it be that he was talking of this area? What a nice coincidence it would be, as the mind thought of how best it would be to greet the other? Would a hug be appropriate, or just a surprised hello? Could it be that bully from the past, with inimical intentions? Should I change course, to avoid meeting the insecurities of my past, was there time? Or, was it the person, the one with that familiar face, that always lurked around in my dreams, in the background, like a side character, an extra, for some reason? Did that person really exist or maybe this was a dream, and I wasn’t actually running? But the thumping felt real, and the breathing strained, now out of tandem. `Nonsense`, I said to my mind, `we are definitely running`. It agreed, as I felt that slight familiar pain that came with running long distances, on the right of my chest, just below the rib cage. The silhouette had now materialised into a man, just another person, walking on the side of the road, probably heading into work, no-one of that sparked recollection from my past, neither one who seemed would play a part of importance in my imagined future, as I passed him by, as the former, in his naivety watched and probably thought I was running alone; Now my mind had slowed down its pace after its little sprint, and I’d caught up, and I said, `we must make sure that you are well hydrated before tomorrow’s run, so you don’t go rambling down an incomprehensible, inconsequential confused chain of thought`, as the both of us vanished into the milky nothingness of that foggy winter morning.
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