The words bled from cracked lips in hoarse shouts and spittle. His hands shook her shoulders so hard she was sure to find his fingertips as bruises on her skin. His face contorted with anger, the thought was absentminded as though waking from a dream and damn it her head throbbed with an ache that sent ripples outwards of dull burn turned to lightning with every fresh wound.

The world shifted painfully back into balance. Her lungs burst for air. Limbs reached out to grab at air until it met dirty cloth. The water bottle pressed gently against her teeth tasted of relief. His expression was no longer one of desperation but grief.

“Can you stand?” He asked in a voice so hoarse she had to wonder how long he’d been shouting.

She flexed her knee, dirt and fresh cuts buried its pale white marks, trying to push against the rubble that stuck into her back and beneath her thighs, gritting her teeth against the waves of torment that flooded into her mouth. “Yes,” She lied in a gasp before she was even halfway to her feet, ligaments protesting at the upward strain on muscle and bone and body.

“I see…” He trailed off. She glanced at him sharply and understood. His certainty had been doused and he missed home. How homesickness made us helpless as ill children stranded far away; not even soft bed sheets and a hot meal could blunt that needling desire to be in familiar arms with the comforting voice of a loved one as rhythmic as the hand that would stroke your head. Safe – where she could rot away amongst familiar furniture and streets she called her own; where she could suffocate in lukewarm water.

He’d already given up two miles south of the border, wiping the blood away from his mouth with the back of his hand.

Your calves were numb from running, pulsing with lactic acid as your chest heaved and you doubled over, gripping your joints, and the breaths did not come without desperate sounds of a body lacking air. You’d dreamed that your legs could take you anywhere at whatever speed you wanted without ever tiring but you learnt the limits of a mortal body quickly: a ten-kilometre run and you couldn’t even make two – should not have taken Johnny up on his bet but damn did that kid make your blood boil. Built for speed, you could fly the short metres as though God had granted wings on your feet, nimble limbs racing to keep time to your heartbeat, but your ankles could not withstand the distance and your knees were scraped and burned.

Just like a kid tripping over her own two feet.

Just like when you were six and you couldn’t tie up your own shoelaces.

Just like the time you had entered a race and went back to get your hat when it’d fallen from your head. Why had you been wearing a hat in the first place?

Your body trembled with the desire to rest and regain oxygen but you knew well enough by now that it made it all the worse to do that. You knew as soon as you sat still, the nausea would rush up your throat and make your head spin.

Can’t give up now. A ten-kilometre run and you had to make two, and then three, five, seven, ten. You dusted the dirt and stones away from your gazes, and took off again, heart still racing at the exertion. Time was running out.

She crowded the empty corners of her hideaway with empty coffee cups, no longer able to stand the vacant spaces that left room for her to think. Most of all she hated the mirror that took up an entire wall and reflected absolutely everything and left nothing out. The light bulb was broken; she didn’t have to meet its gaze in the dark.

She abandoned her sheets in a crooked display every morning and tore them from each other at night in restless dreaming.

At least in her hideaway she was safe – chipped coffee cups and faceless names behind an overly bright screen held little regard for her. She avoided the deserted gaps that called for her to realise that she was running.

She wanted no more of a world that wanted to be perfect, wanted her to be perfect. Even the white wall splayed in front of her was flawed with leftover sticky tape and marks left from hooks ripped off. She was ashamed.

There was nothing she dreaded more than disappointment.