Neil Drumming

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The thought that someone actually made one of these runs in real life seemed so unlikely to me that I wanted to see where it had happened, retrace the steps of it. So I met Steve where the run began, at this burger place on Ludlow Street in New York City. Steve is the kind of guy who is not very good at hiding his feelings. Like, if this were a movie, you could title it Say Everything.

The setup to the run is this. He'd met this woman, Emily, at a birthday party. He was totally smitten.

He kept asking her, you want to go to a movie? Maybe we could hang out sometime.

A year passes. And just like in When Harry Met Sally, they meet a second time. In Steve and Emily's case, it's at the very same birthday party. Same apartment. And they become friends. It was the kind of friendship where, really, it could go either way. She seemed kind of interested in something more, but maybe not enough.

And the longer they were friends, it was like, well, maybe that's what they were. Steve had a job as a film critic. So they would go to movies, lots of movies, where they would not hold hands and not kiss.

What was her reaction?

The run happened on a night where they were not going to hang out. Steve thinks he was working on a review of some mutant Ninja Turtle movie. And after work, he goes out with some friends to a music place.

The place we are sitting in right now. Greasy spoon, tiled white walls, and painted brick. It's like a piece of a subway station that's somehow above ground.

Usually he was pretty quick at getting back to her.

In just two hours, it looked like she'd gone through all these phases. Everything laid out in all these texts. Ending with one that Steve was not expecting.

We are now jogging up Ludlow Street. It's actually kind of exciting.

But taxi after taxi is like, no, there's someone in it. So he keeps running.

Can we talk about the running?

Why does love always involve running?

In the movies they run, but usually it's because someone's about to get married or about to get on a plane, like...

Steve told me he'd been living in the friend universe for so long. And now it was like this little wormhole had opened up. He didn't know for how long, where he might be able to slip into the parallel universe of boyfriend. Steve did eventually get a taxi, made it to her apartment, and he stayed over. And they did become boyfriend and girlfriend. In the movies, this is often the final scene.

The end of the movie is the beginning of the relationship. You don't really get to see how it goes. How he gets too clingy. One of them meets someone else. How it just fades. But that is not this story.

I know things don't always work out in the end. But sometimes you just want to hear the ones that do.

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