Friday, March 5, 2010

Endurance

The sun was up now, and it had the appearance of an ordinary day with its dog walkers, joggers and Sunday morning strollers, but I was in a separate place after running and walking all night.

He came up beside me at a purposeful pace asking, "what is this, some kind of marriage therapy?", and I could not help but notice the thick scar on his neck which seemed to cover some missing piece.

He told me he had recently undergone life saving surgery for throat cancer at the hospital that sponsored the race I was running and that he understood very well what I was doing out here.

He was enjoying the sunlight despite the fact that his wife was cheating on him with his neighbor - a man he hated - through most of his time of mortal fear, not far from death.

This fact was only recently confirmed, although he suspected it for months, along with the news that he was now cancer free.

She had since sealed him out of the house he worked for and off from the children that he loved, but in that sunlit separate place, he held himself open for a moment and showed me a transparent organ barely containing this churning grief and violence which threatened, almost audibly, to metastasize into something far worse.

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