Her Name Is Sophie

Her name is Sophie. That's it. That's the whole development. We found this out walking to the parking lot this morning, after the run, when she said something about the heat coming back this week and I said something about how I was already dreading it, and then we just, introduced ourselves. The way you do. Hi, I'm Elena. Hi, I'm Sophie. And then we went to our separate cars.

I have been running at the same rec center for months now. Sophie has clearly been running there longer. We have shared approximately zero words until a few weeks ago when she told me I'd gotten faster, and I said 'I know' because my brain wasn't working yet, and we both laughed. This morning felt like part two of that. Low stakes. No fanfare. Just two people walking across a parking lot who now know each other's names. I don't know why it felt like something worth noting, but it did.

After. That specific kind of quiet.

I think what I've been circling around, without quite saying it, is that the running stopped feeling like a thing I was trying out somewhere around week three, and I never really acknowledged that out loud. It just became the thing I do on certain mornings. I show up five minutes early. I still pretend to check my phone. I have a favorite lane. Sophie is not the reason I run, she was just the first external confirmation that I'd been doing it long enough to get somewhere. And this morning, her name. Which somehow makes it more real.

I didn't plan to write this post tonight. I was going to do something else, probably nothing, probably fall asleep watching whatever's on. But I opened the laptop and this came out, which is maybe the blog doing what I didn't know I needed it to do. The running is mine. I think I just needed to say that somewhere. Hi, I'm Elena. I run now. That's a real sentence.