Athens. I am taking a taxi from my apartment at 4 a.m. The taxi driver is waiting by the curb, petting a stray cat. 

He is smoking a cigarette and he wants to know why I am up “so damned early.” My driver played college basketball in the US back when he still had hair. He enjoys cussing in English. “Is just more fun.”

We get in the cab. Athens nightlife is still going strong. 

I tell him I am running the Athens Marathon today. He is driving me to the starting line. 

“Why de hell you do dis?” he asks. “You crazy or something?”

He takes a roundabout. He drapes an arm out his window. 

“Why do you run?” he asks. 

We have a long ride from Athens to Marathon. He wants a story. 

So I tell him. My dad was a marathoner. When I was a kid, we spent every weekend at a race, or helping Daddy train for one. On Friday nights, my father and I would ride country roads with two-liter bottles of water. We would pull over every mile and hide them behind fence posts and rocks, then tie a white flag so he could find the water during long runs. 

We spent summer vacations inside pop-up campers in Colorado so he could train on fourteeners for the Pikes Peak Marathon. He was fast. He was strong. Gifted, even. 

Then, one night after his forty-first birthday, he decided he didn’t want to live anymore. He used his brother’s gun. 

Only a few days before, my father had taken me on a run with him. I rode a bike beside him. I was eleven. I was overweight. My father desperately wanted me to lose weight. I could usually feel his disappointment in me. Sometimes I thought I disgusted him. He was all the things I’d never be. He was handsome. Athletic. Tall. Slender. Fit. Beautiful. 

We scattered his ashes atop Pikes Peak. My aunt threw away all his old race bib numbers. My mother took down his photos. 

The driver is on his fourth cigarette. He is only listening. 

“But why do YOU run?” he says. “I do not ask about your father. I ask about YOU.” 

I sigh. 

“It’s complicated,” I explain. 

When my father died, I had a passionate love affair with Little Debbie and Chef Boyardee. I got heavier. I was depressed. I began to dislike myself. 

I became bulimic for a year. I tried to lose weight by vomiting up meals. I think I just wanted to please my dad. Even though he wasn’t around to be pleased. And because I wasn’t getting much nutrition, I got dizzy whenever I stood up. 

Looking back, I think I puked because it gave me a sense of control. 

And then one night, I was staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I gripped my chubby belly and I said to myself, “No.”

I was not going to end up like him.

I was finished hating myself. I went outside and did the only thing I knew. I ran. I jogged in Chuck Taylors and cut-off shorts. And I ran after dark so nobody would laugh. I lasted four minutes before going into oxygen debt. 

After that, I ran each night. In secret. I would run precisely one telephone pole farther than I had the evening before. 

By age fifteen, I was running five miles a day. I had slimmed up, I was eating right, and I had changed inside. 

During those gentle hours I’d spent running, something happened to my soul. Sometimes, I would run and spontaneously start crying. And my tears were always met with the sensation that someone’s arms were wrapping around me. 

Sometimes I’d sit in the weeds and just weep. But they weren’t sad tears. Not entirely. I was… I don’t know. I felt so loved. Love was holding me. Love cradled me. I would sometimes ask this presence through tears, “Are you an angel?” “Are you my dad?” 

And I’d sort of hear in my head an answer. “Think bigger, Sean.” 

And I can’t describe why, but the presence which held me seemed so divinely feminine. Not masculine. Not chock-full of machismo, like Moses parting the sea of testosterone. This was different. This was maternal. 

Our taxi pulls into the village of Marathon. The orange sun is rising over Greece. My driver is still listening. 

“You feel her still sometimes?” the driver asks. 

“Yes.” 

“What does she feel like?” 

“Just… warm.”

He nods. “Yes. I think I know this feeling.” 

The cab pulls over. The driver lets me out. We shake hands. I tell him he ought to charge more for psychotherapy. We laugh. Then I ask what his name is. 

“My name is Apostolos. It means ‘apostle.’ But believe me, I am no saint.” 

He releases my hand. “What does Sean mean?” he asks. 

“It means God has been gracious.”

And believe me. 

She has.