He had been running every night for almost five years now. Some days he ran towards something, some days he ran away. Mostly, he just ran to reassure himself that he could still move. He would imagine hurtling through time and space, his body an arrow, his will a sharp blade cutting away at lassitude like butter.

If his vision was sackcloth, when he ran it turned to gauze.

He liked running by the sea best. Not on the sand, but on the narrow paved footpaths that often bridge beach and road. He ran late, past midnight, past one, past two. It would have been an odd time but for its isolation, which made it obvious. In the city, the last stragglers would be going home, the streets emptying of traffic. Even the dust and smoke in the air would settle down, curling around his ankles, coming to heel like well-trained dogs.

He never ran any fixed distance, but he did make it a point to not stop until he found a place (or time) where there were no people at all, no matter where he looked. He would break for a few minutes then, to breathe in this feeling of space and emptiness. Perhaps he imagined that the night belonged to him for that moment. Perhaps his hubris was grander and he imagined that he belonged to the night.

Then one day, deep into the November of his sixth year running, the shadow appeared. It was a cloudy night but the moon, which had been tucked away behind a wall of solid grey, suddenly found some fluff to shine through and he caught a glimpse of another shadow running next to his own. His first instinct was to look over his shoulder but nobody was there. On his right was the sea. On his left, a string of dilapidated bungalows. Fear made his feet grind to a stop only to see the shadow keep running. It slowed to a halt a little ahead, as though it had only just noticed that he had fallen behind and was waiting for him to catch up.

“Come on,” it seemed to say.

With his heart pounding in his chest he began to run again. He strained to hear footsteps, but the only sound was the thudding of his own feet and the waves. The moon went behind the clouds soon after, and the shadow was swallowed in darkness.

The next night he ran a better lit track, hoping to catch the shadow again, but it was nowhere to be seen. It was almost a week before he saw it once more, but this time, although it only came towards the end of his run, it ran alongside right to the very end. After that day, the shadow became more regular, emboldened. In streetlight, windowlight, moonlight, stretched, shortened, thinned, it ran with him almost every day.

One chilly night that winter, he found himself stopping for his usual breather in front of a warehouse. It was a dreary concrete building with no windows and nothing to recommend itself but two huge neon security lights that threw a perfect square of light in front. He had been here a couple of times before but found it so uninspiring that he had run on almost as soon as he had stopped. Tonight, however, a different idea came into his head. He stepped forward letting his shadow fall into that square. It stretched across the ground in a dark silhouette. Almost immediately, the second shadow stepped up next to him, just as he’d known it would. He took his time studying it, comparing it with his own. He noted the slight curve of the hips, the smaller size. He noted the way it stood with its feet slightly apart, the way its shoulders rose and fell almost imperceptibly as though it was panting as well. It was on that night, in that specific shape and in that specific light, that he named it Yangchen.

*

He had never thought of shadows much, not since he was a child and scared of monsters in the dark, but now they became a part of his constant thoughts. He saw them spilling across the pavement as he walked to the tube station every morning, bending, climbing walls. He saw them in the train compartment—chopped up bits and pieces of strangers on the floor.

One day he remembered the monastery at sundown—how many years had it been? His memory had become hazy, but when he closed his eyes he could see his little room there cramped with things—books and a mattress and hanging robes, steel pans and pots which threw shifting shadows in the flickering light of lanterns and stoves.

“Am I imagining it?” he asked Yangchen, jogging down the boardwalk, skyscrapers glittering in the water.

High plains, frosty rolling winters. The shadows of prayer flags fluttering in the courtyard. He could see them clearly. “But I couldn’t yesterday. Or ten years ago.”

“Plato suggested that reality was nothing more than the play of shadows on the wall of a cave.”

She found him every night. It didn’t matter what route he took or what time he started, she was there. They would run for a good hour or so, then stop and watch the sea, letting the breeze dry off his sweat.

Sometimes he would berate his own shadow. “Can’t you be more like her? Can’t you be free? You could go anywhere you wanted then. You could even…” But he left the thought unfinished, and his shadow remained hopelessly, irrevocably glued to his feet.

He began to notice the absence of shadows just as much as the shadows themselves. He had never realized before how evenly lit the elevator at work was, and how often he completed the journey to the seventy-eighth floor utterly alone. Sitting in his cubicle, he appreciated the little shadowed edge that lined his computer on the white partition behind. Sitting in his cubicle, he hated how all the dark shapes in this space, other than him, seemed to be drawn in straight lines.

In the evenings, he fell back on his books again, looking for solace in familiar words.

A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.

But the more he read out loud, the more the words seemed to fade around the edges and lose meaning till he could barely remember what they had ever meant at all.

“I could never go back, you know. Not to a country that isn’t my own any longer. But you, I’ve named you as I please, but where do you come from?”

There were no answers for him. Nothing but the thud, thud of his own feet and the ocean and a memory of polishing a thousand brass lamps on an endless afternoon.

“My mother used to tell me this story about monkeys who tried to rescue the moon from a well. They were chasing a reflection of course, and when they touched it, it shattered, the branch they were hanging from broke and they drowned.”

They had travelled to the capital in a caravan of yaks. He remembered their smell. The way their coarse fur rubbed his ankles through the thin robes.

All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can’t be touched. Paper, book, pencil, glass, rest in the shade of their names.

And no matter how much he spoke to Yangchen, she was in the end just a shade of her name, and he could never really touch her or feel her.

“Why don’t you come to me at other times? I would enjoy your company at home. I could tell you stories, read you poetry about love.”

And her name was just the name of a shade.

Just like that a year went by, and then two and three. They ran, he talked, they rested, they ran. There was nothing much to talk about in the present, so he talked to her about the past. Of times dead and done. Then one day, at the end of a particularly grueling run, they found themselves in front of the old warehouse again.

“Do you remember this, Yangchen?” he asked her excitedly, even as he struggled to catch his breath. “This is where I named you first.”

She was bent over, holding her knees as she often did when she was tired, but at his words she pulled herself up and seemed to look around. He walked up to the edge of square concentrated light and waited till she drew close.

Nostalgia was a steady pulse at his wrist. She felt it too, he was sure of it. She was standing so near to him, their shoulders were almost brushing against each other. He thought he caught the sharp outline of a nose, as though she had just turned. On an impulse he turned and reached out; his hand grasped empty space but, on the ground, his shadow touched her face.

The world stood still for a moment and then, ever so slowly, her hand came up and rested on his shoulder. His heart was a thundering beat drowning out his thoughts. Gingerly, delicately, he leaned forward and kissed the air. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw her head incline, her arms come around him, till he could longer tell where his shadow ended and hers began.

His laughter rang across the empty compound, bouncing off concrete walls.

And even as he laughed, the shadows continued to kiss, and even as he stepped back, there they were making love on the hard ground, a sweaty knot of bodies, enclosed in their own patch of illumination, free of him. And then the lights blinked, or was it reality? And when they came back on again, the shadows were gone.

He knew he would never see them again.

Loss and relief rose in him in equal measure, but his thoughts were clear after what felt like years. Not quite crystal, perhaps, but wiped glass.