The park greeted me with its usual autumn silence. Leaves carpeted the pathways in shades of rust and gold, wet enough that my footsteps made almost no sound. The air smelled of wet earth and the faint, bitter tang of coffee drifting from the food cart near the entrance.

I pulled my earbuds in, selected a playlist I’d listened to for three months straight without registering a single song, and began to run. My pace was steady, mechanical. I had learned to disappear into the rhythm of it, to let my mind drift somewhere beyond thought, beyond feeling.

I ran past the rose garden, dormant now as the season turned. I approached the bench near the duck pond, a weathered wooden structure where lovers carved initials and teenagers smoked in the evenings.