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In an alternate reality, Jo learns to listen to her body, and in this alternate reality, her body is telling her to run.
Not away from anything per se, more like through things. Through herself.
It’s winter. She’s reminded of something a therapist once said of the season: When everything looks bleak, you just have to think about what’s growing under the surface. 
On those long snowy trails she feels more alive than she has done for some time. She falls in love with that almost feral feeling you get after crossing the 15k mark. Sports scientists would describe such a moment as that of the endocannabinoids kicking in.
Jo would much rather think about it as comparable to a trance-like mental state that she’d sometimes escape to in her teenage years with a group of misfits from school who took her in and showed her what it was that London really had to offer music lovers after dark.
The experience was freeing but complex, not least because if the friends in question struggled with anything it was a complete lack of limits that Jo was thoroughly unable to relate to or understand, given how tightly controlled her home set up was. She straddled both worlds, unable to let down her guard or let people in in either of them.
Before her Forrest-gump style winter, Jo had fallen in love with running once before. She had been eleven years old, started running in the woods with a group of kids and found she was quite good at it, only in the sense that she had qualified for a minor race which meant being included in training sessions.
In Jo’s alternate reality, a reality that is taking place in a future of inconceivable freedom, and in which she is running long distances because that’s exactly what her body wants her to do, she experiences more emotions bubbling up than she knows what to do with. Winter has passed, things are growing, people are smiling. Warmth. 
It’s summer, things are in full bloom. Beautiful things, strange things. Warm things. Scary things. Sometimes, humanly mercurial things. Her body says, slow down a little bit, no need to run that far now. Lie here. Take a look at those clouds. See how nice and safe and magical it feels to be down here watching them. Don’t let that feeling go. 

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