Him and the gym

   It was very annoying, but it was more and more frequent that, in the middle of the night, he had to wake up to a cramp or some other time of pain. It would normally be in his feet or legs but sometimes it was his waist that felt the pain or even his face. He had gone to the doctor several times and to many different ones but none of them was able to tell him why that happened. He hated when it was obvious they were inventing what to say instead of giving him a science based and objective point of view. They just shot in the dark, trying to get it right.

 Many had told him it was the lack of exercise so he tried to jog in the mornings. Soon, he changed it to the afternoons, and then the nights. All of this happening in the same week, as he realized he hated to reorganize his life around such a menial activity. He didn’t understand how some people dared to say they loved to exercise often and for many hours. He didn’t tell this to anyone, but for him all those persons in the gyms and the parks exercising every single hour of the day, were just insane people without any real talent in them.

 Of course, he didn’t tell this to anyone when he signed on for a year at a big gym near his house. A perky girl showed him all the machines, explained the courses he could take (as if he was entering Harvard) and told him about the trainers that helped people there. Some even had experience in the military, which assured quality but also inspired some fear. In his first week he avoided the trainers and the courses and the dancing lessons, in order to focus only in the machines. It was a failure anyway but at least he wasn’t getting yelled at.

 The screams were constant in that place and everyone behaved as if it was extremely normal that a man build like a house would scream a bunch of skinny short women about how they couldn’t meet his extremely bizarre quotas of exercise. The man was clearly deranged somehow, always screaming and never really doing any exercise himself, only when he needed to demonstrate something he wanted all of them to do. Even then it was strange, because he would do the exercise so fast and in such a bizarre way, none of the women would get it fast and the screaming would ensue.

 He wasn’t the only insane one in the place. For a spinning class, there was a lot of yelling there too. The “teacher” there was a woman. She was very beautiful and her body was testament to her prowess in the exercise area but she was another one that yelled a lot. And he could never hold his laughter when looking at the spinning class because it was simply ridiculous. That woman yelling others to accelerate on bikes going nowhere, in a closed room with the concentrated heat that everyone was releasing, without the refreshing sight of the actual world.

 He exercised independently as long as he could but in every area of that place, there was a man or a woman kind of supervising that everyone make good use of the machines, normally looking after the cleanliness of everyone in the gym and to see that everyone was using the machines in the right way. To him, it was amazing how little sense of humor people in a gym could have. He saw a young man once trying to do a choreography he had clearly taken away from the TV on some of the running machines and they simply expelled them for that because they deemed his behavior “irresponsible” and “dangerous”.

 No one laughed there unless it was hypocritical laughter or if the person was talking on the phone. Besides that, the sound that ruled was heavy breathing and the eternal sounds of the machines and the one of the stupid music the put every single day. Every day it was the same playlist, from beginning to end and he already knew it by heart. And what was so annoying about it, is that it was there to make you feel you could always do more, like the music they put on shops and so on.

 Basically, the place was a laboratory, and every stupid person that paid to be there was a mouse or a hamster forever turning in their little wheel like an idiot, not ever thinking twice about anything. It was easy to see how brainwashed some of them are and the scary thing was that the results they had made them even more prone to stay there and keep on going and just obsess about the whole thing. He had hated to rearrange his life around exercise but many others were happy to do it, dedicating even more and more time per week to what they called “the art of exercise”.

 “Horseshit”. That’s what he told his doctor after a couple of months going to the gym. They did a lot of exams and tests and it was revealed that the exercise had nothing to do with whatever was happening to him. The cramps would even get worse some nights and he had slowly became a person that slept on his chest, as it was impossible to him sleeping in any other way. His legs always hurt and his body was still as bad as it was months ago.

 When he saw the results of the test, he decided to quit the gym. He had paid for a year but he didn’t mind “loosing” that money because in any case he had already paid it and new that the people in the gym had already spend it in some stupid machine. So he decided to only exercise in the weekends and on the park and maybe doing something he would enjoy, for a change. He played football with friends sometimes, or with a Frisbee or he could even buy a dog and play with him. The possibilities were endless.

 Yes, he wasn’t ripped like those nutbags from the gym but he started feeling better once he decided to relax about the whole thing and when he decided to get massages and eat better. All of those decisions made him happier than going to an enclosed space to run like a lunatic. Now he enjoyed his life and, even without the killer body, he felt better and that’s all he ever wanted. He had always been happy with who he was and had been depressed the whole time being in the gym. With all the pictures and the trainers and the brainwashing, it was hard not get out of there thinking “I have to be like all of this people”.

 He sometimes saw some of them in the park or in the street and they always gave him this look of superiority. But the look wasn’t only at him but at the world around them. For some stupid reason, all of this toolbags that had once decided to go crazy in the exercise, decided they were better than the rest of us and the worst thing was that all the media and the society at large believed that to be true. We have been taken by the balls by a small group of people and now the prototypes of beauty are radically different than what they were a hundred years ago and even more than what they were on the Renaissance or before.

 But people can stand up to that and just move along, living their lives as they may and not thinking every single second about how they look. He laughed alone when recalling some of the conversations he had overheard in the gym while in the machines or in the locker room. It has to be left clear that he didn’t thought they were all stupid but some of them were such idiots, it was a very difficult thing to ignore. They talked about sex in a way it was simply funny to hear about it, as if it was an exhibition of the caliber of a two peacocks showing their feathers to the one female, who also happened to be ripped like them.

 It hadn’t been his thing but he new that some people liked it and he was fine with it. Even some of his friends told him he should have at list used his membership the whole year, at least once a week. But he told them he simply couldn’t stand going there anymore. Seeing the faces of people that claimed they had fun exercising but were there every day stressed out because they didn’t lose as much weight as they had planned or because they wouldn’t meet theirs trainer’s demands. It was a disaster.

 He finally decided to buy that dog and it was the best decision he ever had. Not only he had tons of exercise running after his furry acquisition, the dog also became his best and most loyal friend. And that was something exercising like a lunatic couldn’t offer. It couldn’t give you real feelings, only shallow ones that surfaced because you can’t even think as you kill yourself on those damned machines.

Today I'm sick

   Today I am sick. Today I feel awful and my environment is not helping at all. The guys I live with only know how to be gross and loud and that has always annoyed me. I mean, what has always annoyed me has been the fact that people are so oblivious of what they do and not do. People are sometimes disgusting but they don’t even realize it and me, as a person who claims to be clean and neat in general, I really don’t like it.

 Every single day those conversations in Arabic. Every fucking day. I don’t care where people are from; I couldn’t care less to be honest. But destiny had to put a person that talks in one of the most aggressive languages in the world just a window away from me. And, apparently, he speaks to every member of his family every single day of the year. That’s nice but couldn’t he do it in a lower volume and just type once in a while?

 Of course, people don’t have to live by what I feel or think but sometimes I know I’m right and I don’t need to test my theories because I simply know how to be a decent person. Other people are used to screaming, yelling whatever it is they want to communicate. I don’t. The only time I yell is when I’m desperate and I always do it with people I feel I know, not with a bunch of people I don’t really know nothing about.

 The same thing happens when I have to hear that same guy masturbate or do I don’t really know what. He’s apparently oblivious to the fact that he is really loud and that he has his window open every fucking day at every hour. The climate now is colder than some months ago. What is he thinking?

 I am sick but as in ill. My head hurts a lot, as if my brain had detached from the cranium and now it just moves around in there. My jaw also seems to pulsate with pain, my cheekbones and my throat. Passing saliva hurts a lot and I just want this to go away.

 I know this is my fault, I made it happen. I was silly enough to sleep one night with no socks or a t-shirt and that is suicide when temperatures can get very low at night. I assume all responsibility for getting this virus but I want to get rid of it too, I want to make it go away and feel good again. I hate to be sick and feel defenseless and confused.

 It hurts even more because I’m alone. There’s no one here to help, there’s no one who can even care about how I feel. I don’t have the things I need close to me because I am always distracted and never focused on what I should be focused. I miss them now, as I miss them very single day of my life. I miss my bed.

Damn it… My belly hurts now and I don’t even remember what I ate yesterday. Nothing “dangerous”, that I now off. But it hurts a lot and also does my back and my chest and, again, my throat. I think I just want to lay here in my bed for the rest of the day but I have a problem with that and it is the fact that I need to get out and by some medicine so this can go away quicker.

 Sadly, I don’t live in a normal place when pharmacies have delivery to your home or even online service. No, apparently the XXIst century hasn’t reached this so-called “first world country”. Which, in many aspects, it’s a shame.

Again, loud noises. Again, doors are being slammed and steps been walked with those shoes that looked donated from a war. Yes, I am the kind of person that just people for how they look in general. Call me an awful human being then and move along.

 It hurts too much and I have no idea why I decided to write something today. Maybe it’s guilt that I didn’t write last Sunday or maybe it’s because I feel I need to prove myself to people I don’t even know every single day of the year. But not today, not anymore.

 I don’t feel good so let’s leave it here, half the normal size. We will see each other tomorrow, I hope.

The frozen forest

   Blood slowly dripped from the top of the tallest tree surrounding the clearing. It glistened again the moonlight and didn’t stop until it hit the frozen forest soil. Something had happened up there, something that no creature in the forest was willing to explain or understand. The blood on the tree froze and remained there forever, working as reminder to every single creature to be very careful on this part of the world.

 A long time after that, a woman dedicated to washing the clothes of others got lost in the forest. She had been washing sheets and dirty underwear in the cold water of the river but she had lost her way because of the snow, that had begun to fall very slowly, changing every single aspect of the forest in the process.

 Unknown to the woman, she was being watched by various creatures but not because they wanted her out of because they feared her. They just wanted her to leave forever and never return. They knew that the frozen trail of blood on the tallest tree was from human origin and that, in simple words, meant that humans were better off very far from the forest.

 However, the laundry lady had gotten lost. She was not a young woman, rather having a lot of experience in what she did, as she had been doing it for the past thirty years, at least. It had been her mother who taught her everything “ a woman should know”. And she learned everything because women could learn so little that it was better for her to get every piece of information available, instead of suffering for what wasn’t true.

 She had dreamed, long ago, to marry a handsome man and have beautiful children and leave the rest of her days as the best housewife in town. Her little corner of the world was so peaceful and small, that she never thought thinking what she thought was asking too much. After all, every other girl had exactly the same luck, with various results but at least they got to have a proper family.

 Her name was Irene, after her mother, and no one had ever asked her to marry. She knew she wasn’t the prettiest girl in town but she was one of few girls available. And, as uncommon as it was, there were more single men in town than single women. And even so, she remained a spinster for the rest of her life. As old as she was now, she knew she wasn’t going to have any chance of having the life she had always wanted. Instead, she found herself a nice little cottage and people came over to leave their dirty laundry for her to wash. It was a simple and sad life.

 When she got lost, she didn’t really got scared. Her life was so full of the same always, that a little bit of excitement wasn’t unwelcomed. Irene had a big bag on her back, carrying everything she had been washing and realized she needed to head back fast or frost will begin to form on the wet parts of the sheets and defrosting them would be even harder inside of her house. She used her chimney fire to dry the clothes and other items but if frost was involved, it would take much longer and the payment would also take longer to reach her.

 She walked and walked, first with no worry but as the sun began to fold, she accelerated her steps. Suddenly, Irene arrived to the clearing were the tall tree stood but because of the snow, she didn’t notice the frozen blood or the large amount of birds watching her from above. She stopped walking and started yelling “Hello!” to no avail. The truth was, and she had no way of knowing it, that she had walked farther and farther away from town instead of getting closer to it.

 No one ever reached the clearing, not even in the summer. It was a private place the forest revealed only in special occasions and, apparently, Irene was special enough to get there. But that, somehow, wasn’t a good thing. Snow was pilling up and the forest was slowly getting darker. The woman, now desperate, turned around and ran into the forest but it was too late. The trees had suddenly decided to be closer that they had been before, so walking between them was now very difficult. The lack of light made it hard for Irene to see that she was slowly making a circle.

 After a while, she got back into the clearing and it was then when she dropped her bag, fell to her knees and started to cry and to beg for help. She yelled and cried very loudly in order to be heard and she actually managed to do that but that person, a hunter returning home, confused her voice with the sounds in the wind. To put it simply, he thought he had been too long out in the woods and that he needed food and the warmth of his home and family.

 Irene stopped yelling, she also stopped punching the frozen soil, which made her hands hurt because it was like punching steel. She cried but it hurt too badly so she stopped fast. She looked around and realized that, despite being night, there was some kind of light illuminating the clearing. She looked everywhere for the source and realized someone was coming. She stood up fast, thinking help was on the way.

 But it wasn’t a helping hand. It was a figure wearing a cloak, revealing no human attributes except the shape. It didn’t seem to be walking like normal people did, instead floating around, as it happened to be some sort of ghost. Irene’s hope vanished and tried to get back to the forest but everything behind her was black, she couldn’t see trees or anything else. There appeared to be a very black wall there and she just couldn’t run anywhere. Anyway, her feet were unresponsive and once she tried to walk, she fell to the ground.

 The figure then stood in front of her and appeared to wait there. It was unclear what it was waiting for, if it needed Irene to speak first or if it was there for other matters and was completely ignoring the fact that Irene was there.

 Then, the creature started to transform. It grew a bit larger and Irene could see feet and hand emerge from the bright cloak that had been floating in front of her before. As the feet touched the ground, the hands pulled back the cloak’s hood and revealed the head of a woman. In appearance, it did look like a woman but she wasn’t like Irene. The laundry lady was older, had pale skin and blue eyes. She was taller than many women and her nose was bigger too.

 The figure, or rather, the woman beneath the cloak, was smaller even as it had grown larger, had bronze skin and big hazelnut eyes. Her skin seemed to be really soft and her ears and nose were very delicate. She looked patiently at Irene, and then spoke.

      - You are alone. – She said.

Irene started crying again, but this time she didn’t care about how much it hurt to do that in a frozen forest. Slowly, she nodded to accept the spirit’s statement. She then noticed the women that had appeared before her had some sort of drawing on her faces, very subtle and beautiful.

      - You don’t have to.

And she raised one hand and offered it to Irene. The villager had no idea what to do. Something, a voice in her head, told her to hold that hand. But her inner voice, the one that was actually hers, was afraid of what might happen. She was afraid that this apparition had something to do with death and, she had known this for a while, she wasn’t ready to die.

      - I’m not ready to die.

It escaped her lips as she had thought about it. Surprisingly, the spirit kept its hand stretched towards Irene and, suddenly, she smiled. And then Irene’s hand just decided, almost by itself, to grab the hand of the spirit. Then it was all engulfed in white light and the older woman thought her moment had finally come.

 But that wasn’t the case. Irene was again at the edge of the river and it was still day. The sheets were on the bag and she had to get going. She could see the smoke of a house and knew that was the way towards the town. As she walked to her home, she wondered about the spirit and asked herself if she had dreamt the whole thing. It was only when she got home and found a person knocking on her door, that she realized she hadn’t dreamt anything.

 The girl with hazelnut eyes, bronze skin and beautiful nose, was knocking on her door.

Bad holiday

   It had always been a mystery to her why so many men ran to help her when she needed something. They always did that and she guessed it was due to her looks but she had never done a proper effort to look good. She thought that made her a bit of a bitch, not realizing what she looked like. But the truth was she didn’t care and she sometimes thought the attention could get to be very annoying. In that moment, it was good because she had to come down from the boat to the beach, so she appreciates the two guys that helped her. She could have spared the looks that were more accurate for wolves than for men, but she didn’t say anything. She just kept on walking, her small purse on one hand and her hat in the other. They had been on an excursion near the island, watching the reef.

 Mia was having a holiday alone, far away from anyone she knew. She had always dreamed of visiting the French Polynesia so she had used practically all of her saving to come. The excursions and the food and most things were included in the price so she didn’t have to worry. The thing was she always made money even if she wasn’t doing anything. That’s because she had invented this kitchen utensil that many people were using now, so every month they paid her a part of the winnings and it was good money. She had made the invention one night, not drunk but almost. She always told another version of the story because it wasn’t really glamorous to talk about how much she vomited that night. So she changed the story to a simpler one and people loved her.

 Thanks to them, she was there: walking slowly through the beach, feeling the soft granules of sand on her feet. The sand her wasn’t coarse and annoying like in other beaches and Mia liked that because she had always loved the ocean but had rarely found places to fully enjoy it. When she was young, she used to love to pack all of her toys and the do a castle and make all her toys live there. Her parents and brother would help and it would be one of the best days of her life. But those trips were just a memory now. She thought she could ask her parents and brother to come with her to the beach one day, but they would probably say no. After all, they all had different lives now.

 She had to stop walking, as a tall-bronzed man blocked her path. She smiled at him and kept walking, passing by his right. The man had a stupid face and thought Mia would fall for him as soon as she had seen him in his swimwear but Mia hadn’t even notice. She didn’t wanted to talk to Hugo, who was one of the entertainers of the hotel and been asking her for a drink since she had arrived there. He was relentless and always asked for the same thing, during breakfast, lunch and dinner and in between too. It wasn’t that he was ugly or something because he was what most people would call “perfect”. But she just wasn’t interested.

 The truth was Mia had a lot on her mind. Many thought it was because of a man and that offended her deeply. When people thought she was just a thing to be used by someone else, she just got furious and, it a really bad mood, she would answer back and not in the best way possible. Mia knew she could be pretty destructive if she wanted so she was training herself to be more at ease, not to snap so easily. So when people thought she looked sad because of a man, she just smiled and moved on, not even acknowledging someone had talked. The truth was that she hadn’t been with a man in quite some time, not sexually nor sentimentally. She just felt she wasn’t ready for that and that it wasn’t really her priority in life but explaining that to so many people would have been exhausting.

 So every time Hugo came to her, she had said no. She would have said yes just to do something different, but she knew Hugo would take it as a triumph and would emphasize that aspect of the whole thing whenever they found themselves outside. And as the hotel was on a small island, she really didn’t wanted to be the one everyone looked and talked about. Soon, she realized she didn’t even need to say yes. The day after the excursion, she woke up later than usual, just wanting to use that day to be on the beach and read or something. She didn’t want to think, just rest a lot, as she suddenly felt extremely tired. As if she had pulled a truck in her dreams, with her teeth.

 She showered fast, put on her bikini and went down to the beach with some fruit she had grabbed from the breakfast buffet the previous morning. She put it in her purse along with a book and her cellphone, where she had tons of games if she ever got extremely bored like in that moment. Mia noticed something was wrong the moment she passed through the reception and did what she always like to do: greet the staff there. She waved her hand but no one responded, one woman even looking at her as if she had done the worst thing possible. She continued to the beach, wondering why the reaction but then she noticed more and more people stared at her and talked, not even interested in covering their mouths.

 Mia adjusted her hat and her purse and kept on going until she reached the beach. She found a lonely spot for her to lay down her towel and sit down. She was about to lie down to close her eyes and just sleep if she could but she was interrupted by the sound of a quarrel. She turned her head and realized it was a man and his wife. They were arguing really loudly and pushing each other, every sentence been louder than the one before. It was beginning to be really annoying so Mia took some headphones from her purse and connected them to her phone. Music would be welcomed during such an event.

 Music wasn’t heard for long. The fight got louder and then she noticed the woman coming to where she was. For a moment, she thought the woman just wanted to walk down the beach in a rage, far away from her husband. But no, the woman stopped right there where Mia was and started talking. Mia removed her headphones only to catch the word “slut”. She stood up and asked the woman if she needed help with something and then the woman just slapped her and went away. It wasn’t that it hurt as much as it was about feeling like shit. Mia felt every eye on her and that was even weirder when she still felt the slap and she saw the husband not doing anything, just standing there like and idiot.

 She went back to her towel, still massaging her cheek. She turned her head around to see if someone was still looking and they weren’t but some were laughing and obviously describing what had happened. Mia then felt really bad and about to cry, mainly because she felt she was alone but she fought her need to cry and decided just to lay down there and try to sleep. She would go to her room after that and just ask for her lunch to be delivered there. She did manage to rest for a while until two people from the management came to speak with her. They woke her up in the rudest way possible and asked her, more like demanded her, to join them in their office in the act.

 Mia walked right behind them, her towel on one arm, her hat on one hand and her purse on her shoulder. She felt her sandals filled with sand but she hadn’t had time to properly clean them. They walked past the reception again and then arrived to a door that they opened with a key only available to the staff. There were several offices behind that door, all with now windows, like in a bunker. They reached an empty one and asked her to sit down. She was there, they said without delay, because a woman staying at the hotel had denounced her as a threat to the peace of the people there. Mia was about to say she was also a guest there but they kept on talking, saying how seriously they took these allegations, citing how conservative people of the region were.

 Suddenly, Mia had a flashback to dozens of women with no tops of and a boat they called the “orgy yacht”. But she didn’t say anything about that. She just bore with them, as they said all they had to say. Finally, she was able to speak and said that if they expelled her they would be sued, as everything that had been said about her was a lie, probably invented by a man that felt bad because she wouldn’t say yes. She asked them to provide proof that she was as they thought she was. If they did she would leave and if not she would stay the week, would she had paid for. They just looked at each other and let her go.

 Some people still looked at her as if she was insane and a pervert. Others tried to apologize but she just stood up and went away. People were always too fast to pass judgment but they never really thought before acting. Mia stayed there the week she had paid and then just disappeared, leaving very late at night and preferring to sleep at the airport. She wanted the holidays to be done as soon as possible.