The Tunnel Runner Pt. 3

Read Tunnel Runner Pt. 1 here.
Read Tunnel Runner Pt. 2 here.

“Hello”

My voice boomed through the hollow darkness thus stopping the runner dead sharp in his tracks. As the runner caught up with his breath gradually, the impregnated echo of my address, abreast with the runner’s eagerness died as abruptly as my hello! had.

“Is it you again? I thought I had left you behind when I re-started my run sometime ago!” The runner‘s anxious question felt through the tarred blackness like a blind groper in an urge to reach my ears.

“Yes, it’s me again!”

“How come?” the runner screamed with a shocked exclamation as that of a bewildered kid who meets with a puzzling scenario for the first time. His response betrayed a heady mix of emotions in his voice, that of exasperation, that of non-achievement, of failure and surprise, that had quickly galvanized into broken shards of emotional expressions from the earlier unitary mirror of his enthusiasm. The runner stepped closer to me, sensing the tobacco's trail in the damp air and said, “Were you running along with me? Or did I just go around in a circle and came back to the same position?” His anxiety rose with the number of questions that were spilling out from his mouth like the overflowing water from archimedes’ tub. Perhaps, on the verge of Eureka!

“Were all my efforts.....so far pointless? Am I at the same spot all over again, from where I'd left you earlier?”, he enquired further

“No”

“Was I running around in circles?” He asked next.

“No”

“If I was not going around in circles and if I am not at the same place. Then what the hell just happened? How is it possible for you to be here, when all you did was to stand still at just one spot?” The Runner questioned me more.

“You are gaining something,” I replied.

“What is it?”

“An identity,” I answered him. “You are trying to be like light. You are, by pursuing light, not achieving it, but rather becoming like it. Light is forever condemned to be in motion. To be in motion is to mean the very existence for it. Light cannot afford to stop, for it will then lose its identity. The electrical part of light jumps forward and creates a magnetic field. The magnetic field thus created further creates an electrical impulse, which in turn creates the next magnetic field and so on. This constant motion is what gives to light, its identity. That’s why it becomes visible, and it becomes seen. If this motion stops, so will the existence of light come to an end as well.”

“The act of running makes you visible, and felt. But that what is visible and felt has characteristics, in other words: an identity. By running in the pursuit of light in this tunnel, you are running for an identity. You may or may not have ended at the same point here with me, where both you and me are standing at right now, but what you have gained is an identity for yourself. You are defining that identity by attempting to be in motion just like light.”

“You are not running for yourself. But you are running for your identity,” my voice trailed off in the whispery darkness as my lips smilingly embraced a cigarette between them.