I have never called myself a runner, even after months of doing it consistently enough that my body now wakes before my alarm does. For most of my life in Malaysia, I resisted the outdoors in KL entirely. The heat here does not simply warm you. It settles into your skin and stays, thick and humid, without the mercy of an ocean to dive into when it becomes unbearable. I preferred rooms with air conditioning and the certainty of staying dry.
What changed, I think, was noticing everyone else who was already outside. On my first few reluctant mornings, I found a park already alive before seven: aunties doing square dance in loose formation, their movements unhurried and precise; elderly men and women moving through tai-chi or qi gong with a stillness that made my own breathless running feel almost rude by comparison; people reading on a bench with their backs to the sunrise; people walking no dog to no particular destination, just walking. Other runners nodding as they pass: the small, wordless acknowledgment of people who understand something about the hour without needing to say it aloud. I did not expect to feel, watching all this, that I belonged to something. But I did.
That feeling became a Sunday ritual with a friend. It was less about the running itself than the hour after when we would slow to a walk, watch the park wake up around us, and quietly unload whatever the week had left in us. On some weeks, the only real subject of conversation was the sky: whether it is going to rain, or if we should bring a cap. Ordinary questions, the kind you ask without dread.
Last Sunday, the question was different.
“Are we going to die out here,” my friend asked, only half joking, looking at the haze already pressing down over the tree line. Neither of us could run in a mask, since running asks for more air, not less. We stood at the park’s edge for a moment, deciding, and then we didn’t go in. Not because we chose caution over the run, but because the choice, for once, had already been made for us.
I woke a few mornings later to haze sitting directly outside my window, and the thought that arrived first was not a practical one. It was one of fear, plain and unfamiliar: is this the world we are going to live in now?
I have watched enough films with collapsed cities and oxygen tanks to have built, somewhere in the back of my mind, a comfortable distance from that future. I always assumed it belonged to a much later decade, if not a different century altogether. I did not think I would recognise it this early on, nor quite this soon. But there is very little cinematic effect about standing by your own window, breathing air you have started to quietly distrust, watching wildfires reported the way weather once was. The distance I had assumed was no longer there.
Running the air purifier on its highest setting changes nothing about the air the rest of the city is breathing outside my four walls. I know this. I think most of us do. What I keep returning to is a harder question than how do I keep myself comfortable, which is why does this feel like something we are each enduring alone, behind our own windows, instead of something we are standing against together. Politics has managed, at various points, to pull entire generations of us into the same streets over the same cause. I have not yet seen the environment do that here, not at that scale, even as it takes something from all of us more or less equally.
I do not think we are people inclined to complain and sit idly. I have never believed that about us as Anak Malaysia. What I am less certain of is whether we have truly allowed ourselves to feel the scale of this in the way we have felt the scale of other things worth marching for, or whether it is easier to keep it small: a cancelled run, a shut window, a private disappointment absorbed quietly before the week continues.
But even that, is its own quiet privilege I don’t think it fully registered until I looked at my surroundings. The construction workers on the site down my street continue work through the haze because scaffolding doesn’t pause for an API reading. The people who sweep our roads and clear our drains are outdoors on full shifts, every day this week, while I’ve spent whole mornings deciding whether it’s safe to open even one window. The motorcyclists idling beside me at the traffic light, filled delivery boxes strapped to the back of their bikes, take in more of this air in a single afternoon than I ever will in a month worth of runs – no windshield, no filtered cabin, sometimes no face mask, only whatever cloth they have on hand that morning.
Haze does not ask any of us for consent. And I think that distinction deserves to be said out loud rather than folded quietly into an essay about my own morning routine.
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