The Man Who Ran From Himself

Jaikun was twenty-seven years old and already tired of breathing.

Not tired in the way that makes you yawn. Tired in the way that makes you look at a beautiful sunset and feel nothing except the quiet calculation of how many minutes remain before you have to go inside and wash the dishes.

He was Chinese-Jamaican, a collision of two cultures that prized resilience, hard work, and the suppression of complaint. His father emigrated from Guangdong to Kingston in the 1980s and married a woman from St. Andrew whose father had done the same thing a generation earlier. Jaikun grew up eating saltfish and ackee alongside stir-fried bok choy. He spoke patois in the street and Cantonese at the dinner table. He was a walking hybrid, and he hated every part of himself equally.

 

By twenty-seven, he had tried everything.

He tried architecture school. Dropped out in his third year. He said the lines were too straight, which was a lie. The lines were fine. He was the problem.

He tried opening a jerk chicken food truck with a Chinese barbecue twist. Call it "Jaikun's Yardbird." It made money. He hated the smell of smoke on his clothes. He hated the customers who told him he was "so interesting" as if his existence was a novelty act. He sold the truck to his cousin for half its value just to watch it drive away.

He tried a relationship with a woman named Tashie. She was kind. She laughed easily. She touched his face when he was quiet. He stayed with her for eighteen months, and every single day he felt like a prisoner serving a sentence he had willingly signed up for. He broke up with her on a Tuesday. She cried. He felt nothing except a mild annoyance that he now had to find a new place to buy ginger beer.

His mother called him "difficult." His father called him "lazy." His friends called him "deep" because they had no other explanation for why he would stare at a wall for twenty minutes during a party.

But Jaikun was not deep. He was not philosophical. He was not suffering from some romantic, tortured genius affliction.

He was simply, mortally, dissatisfied.

With everything.

The coffee was too hot or too cold. The sun was too bright or the rain was too wet. His own hands looked wrong to him, too small for a man his size. His voice sounded like a stranger's. When he achieved something, the victory turned to ash in his mouth before the applause finished. When he failed, he felt nothing except a weary confirmation that he had expected it all along.

He could not stand to be alone with his own brain.

So he kept himself busy.

Not productive, busy. There is a difference. Productivity builds something. Busyness just fills the silence.

Jaikun became a virtuoso of distraction.

He learned to play the erhu at 2 AM so he wouldn't have to lie in bed listening to his own pulse. He started running marathons not because he loved running but because a three-hour race meant three hours where the only thing he had to think about was the next step, the next breath, the next mile marker. He took up woodworking and filled his apartment with crooked tables and splintered chairs. He downloaded language apps and learned enough Korean to order coffee in Seoul, then abandoned it for Japanese, then abandoned that for nothing.

He worked three jobs at one point. Not for the money—his father had left him a modest inheritance that meant he never had to worry about rent. He worked because idle time was the enemy. Idle time was the unlocked door. Idle time was when the dissatisfaction would crawl out of the floorboards and sit on his chest and whisper:

You don't belong anywhere. Not in China. Not in Jamaica. Not in this body. Not in this life.

So he ran.

He traveled. He went to Tokyo and felt like a ghost walking through a television screen. He went to Kingston and felt like a tourist in his own childhood. He went to Toronto, where everyone is from somewhere else, and felt so perfectly anonymous that it almost felt like peace. Almost. But peace, he discovered, was just another word for boredom, and boredom was the gateway drug to his own rotten company.

One night, he was in a hostel in Medellín. He had no reason to be in Medellín. He had simply looked at a map and put his finger down. There were six other people in the common room. A German girl was reading. Two Australians were playing cards. An older man from somewhere in Africa was making tea.

Jaikun sat in the corner, scrolling his phone, feeling the familiar weight of nothing.

The older man sat across from him. He was maybe sixty. His face was a map of wrinkles that looked earned, not just aged.

"You are running," the man said. Not a question.

Jaikun looked up. "Excuse me?"

"Your leg is bouncing. You have checked your phone fourteen times in the last ten minutes. You looked at the door three times. You are not here. You are running."

Jaikun wanted to be angry, but he was too tired. "Maybe I just have anxiety."

"No," the man said, stirring his tea. "Anxiety is fear of something. You are not afraid. You are fleeing. There is a difference. A man who is afraid runs to something like safety, comfort, a door. A man who is fleeing runs from something he cannot outrun. That is you."

Jaikun put his phone down. "What am I running from?"

The man smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of someone who had already seen the ending of the movie. "Yourself. Obviously. The question is not what. The question is why you think geography will solve an internal problem."

Jaikun stood up. He walked out of the hostel. He walked through the streets of Medellín for three hours. He walked until his feet blistered. He walked until the city grew quiet and the only sound was his own breathing.

And for one terrible, honest moment, he stopped.

He stood on a corner under a flickering streetlight. No phone. No music. No destination. No distraction. Just Jaikun, alone with Jaikun.

The dissatisfaction rose up like a wave.

He felt it all at once. The failed architecture degree. The sold food truck. The look on Tashie's face when he told her he didn't love her. His father's silent disappointment. His mother's bewildered love. The way he had spent ten years running in circles, trying to outrun a shadow that was attached to his own feet.

He did not cry. He was not sure he remembered how.

But he stayed there. For five minutes. Ten. He did not pull out his phone. He did not plan his next trip. He did not call anyone.

He just stood in the dissatisfaction. He let it wash over him. He let it sit.

And for the first time in his adult life, he realized something terrible and liberating:

He had never actually tried being still. He had tried everything else. Every hobby. Every country. Every escape. But he had never simply stopped and said: I am here. I am dissatisfied. And maybe that is just the weather, not the climate.

He walked back to the hostel at 3 AM. The old man was gone. The German girl was asleep on the couch. Jaikun sat down in the dark.

He did not feel better.

But he stopped bouncing his leg.

He would try stillness for a while. He would let the dissatisfaction have its say. And perhaps, eventually, he would discover that the person he was running from was not an enemy.

Perhaps, eventually, he would discover that Jaikun was just a man. And a man, even a mortally dissatisfied one, deserved to stop running long enough to catch his own breath.

He stayed in Medellín for another month. He did not go sightseeing. He did not take photos. He sat in a park every afternoon and watched the dogs run in circles, chasing nothing, perfectly happy to be exactly where they were.

Jaikun was not happy. But for the first time, he was present.

And present was a start.