tiny crowns clink against the porcelain sink. in this trance, teeth fall like winter rain and each loss reverberates in the cavern of my mouth. voids-within-a-void. i jolt awake at 2 am, tracing a phantom absence with my tongue. tomorrow's my first 10k of the year, but it's not pre-race anxiety that keeps me awake - it's the fear of sleeplessness itself. i have recurring dreams of losing teeth, and each time i'm reminded of the quote by black-toothed sartre, who speaks of the life of a man without teeth, who's never bitten, waiting - and then ascertains that they don't have teeth anymore.
come 7am, anticipation condenses into visible puffs of breath in central park. new york february stings and claws at you like a phantom dream. a thousand strangers huddle at the starting line, all buying into the same absurd ritual: $50 to run loops around a park at dawn. frostbite clamp my fingertips, but six miles ahead, there's something i still want to hold. something i want to become - or perhaps outrun.
races aren't competitions, not really. despite their name, you don't run against others: it's you versus the clock. but the crowd matters. J and M flank me in the beginning, and their rapid strides motivate me to push myself. familiar strangers blur in my periphery, the rhythm of their footstrike tugging me forward.
this is the magic of shared air: a cultish camaraderie forged by pounding hearts and aching feet. in step with you, it all boils down to you and the clock.
the first three miles are negotiation: breath vs cold, ambition vs steadiness. by mile four my body melts into motion. muscles loosen, thoughts dissipate, pace stabilizes.
then *she* appears - another runner, similar stature to mine, blitzing past me from
a blip of jealousy seizes me, acidic and absurd. i don't know who this is - she is but a stranger.
atluru calls these moments 'invisible duels' - unspoken competitions that emerge with strangers, whose achievements serving as distorted mirrors of our own progress. the blur of this phantom's neon shoes taunt me, a funhouse reflection of my own complacency. i push harder, choking on her dust, until the void between us is impenetrable.
what is this void? what is it the french say? l’appel du vide - standing at the edge of the cliff, staring into the abyss. is it something to run away from or run towards? is it a space of your deepest fears about fulfilling your own potential, or where striving ceases?
by mile 5, the chase unravels and the mirage evaporates. she is not my rival. it's just me, me and my teeth in perpetual instability, the alarm ringing in my ears announcing my time is up.
even alone, these phantoms haunt me. on the treadmill, in this dinky $10/month planet fitness alternate universe, i imagine the shadow-monsters from *temple run* nipping at my heels. what if they ran beside me? what if the gap between us widened, teeth gnashing at empty air? This is the trap: mistaking projections for benchmarks, letting phantoms diagnose the voids they cannot fill.
yet they are not all distractions; peripheral pace-setting is effective motivation. mentors ahead shift the frontier of possibility. while these silent competitions can pull us away from *authentic self-determination*, they also serve as waypoints in our journey. in a river, there are no lanes; currents carry all who dare swim. you just have to dare to weave through the crowd and chart your own wayward path. a friend asks me what word i'd choose to describe 2025, and i answer without hesitation: forward.
murakami famously speaks of the twinship between running and writing. with a daily dose of 10 kilometers and 10 pages of manuscript, he strikes a covenant with motion. For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die. he runs to enter the realm of the metaphysical, where his inner voice echoes loudest and he accesses his own notion of a void. "i run in void. or maybe I should put it the other way: i run in order to acquire a void."
humans are viscerally uncomfortable with emptiness. we itch to fill up space in conversation & in places. we yearn to assert our presence - yet to confront the void means to accept the inevitability of nothingness. to invoke zen buddhism, the void can also be a peaceful emptiness you carry within. 無心—“no mind”— a peaceful state of consciousness you carry within you. it refers to a state of mental emptiness and total presence, ingredients that facilitate the natural emergence of new ideas. within this zone, your mind can wander and thoughts unfold into their natural trajectories. it's no wonder my clearest writing ideas come from morning runs & why running feels like an existential exercise in meditation.
we carry voids within us. the spaces between breaths. the gaps in our teeth. we can fill cavities with overthinking, escape mechanisms, falsified competitions with others - but it's something to embrace rather than escape. perhaps this is how we learn to run alongside our ghosts, letting their footfalls mix with our own in the morning air.