OOM: Rationalization
Isn’t it interesting, the rational part of Hannah’s brain said, observing the rest of her with an almost clinical detachment that the rational part of her brain said probably should have found more worrying than she did, to think about just how much the human body can do and endure and whatever, even when it hasn’t had sufficient food or rest in something like two weeks?
In this case, what the human body in question (hers) is doing and enduring and whatevering, is running, full out, around the lake. Her father observed once that there was probably something psychologically significant to the fact that his daughter deals with problems by (literally) running. Hannah, however, does not think that being licensed to muck around with the outsides of people’s heads gives you open access to the insides as well, and doesn’t care. This is how she deals. She runs.
The only problem with running, really, is that it doesn’t much occupy your brain, and since the one thing Hannah cannot seem to do right now is stop thinking, it might have been better to tackle crossword puzzles, or journal articles, or, say, learning Portuguese.
Instead, she’s got a jumble of thoughts, half-formed and incomplete, with a common theme of worry, worry, worry, partly about the same things she’s been worried about for the last 17 days, but now mostly about the fact that she’s scared, suddenly, of the what this is doing to her, and to Henry, and to whatever term she ought to be using for idea of her and Henry, and whether or not she’s being horribly selfish and unfair and . . . and . . . unreasonable? offers the rational part of her mind . . . yes, all right, unreasonable in all this.
And in the end, what she knows, what’s clear in that jumble of thoughts, are two things. One, is that selfish and unfair and unreasonable or not (and she’s pretty sure, honestly, that it’s at least a little all or the above), if he weren’t here, or he didn’t care, she’d probably just keep on running till the Universe actually ended. And two, she really doesn’t like that little girl.
She’s fairly certain he knows the first, and she won’t mention the second (what would she say, anyway? Your friend hurt my feelings?).
So she’ll run, all the way around the lake, and then she’ll go in, and shower, and get dressed in the clothes that aren’t hers, and go down to breakfast, and try to eat it. And when she sees him, she’ll smile, and they’ll talk about other things.
It’s what the rational part of her brain has decided. Hannah is rather hoping that the rest of her brain listens.