Simmer

   Just the sight of the stretch marks in his arms, close to his armpits, was enough to make him swim abruptly and very fast, further into the ocean. He could see the people and the beach getting away, he couldn’t feel the bottom anymore and, when he stopped, he noticed he had passed the border marked by the buoys. He swam towards one of them and rested there for a while. He was very agitated because of the effort, his chest going up and down. It seemed he was having problem breathing. Shortly after, a lifeguard boat appeared and offered him help. But he was able to say that he didn’t want any and then swam towards the beach.

 It took him a little more time getting there, making a few stops along the way. The salty water of the ocean mixed with the salty water from his tears, but no one knew that or noticed that in the beach. No one really had seen him going that far, everyone was minding their own business, not caring if a guy just swam like a mad man. When he got to the beach, he stood on the edge for a while, cleaning his face and letting the water drip from his body. Then he walked up to one of the showers by the walkway and showered thoroughly there, he had sand all over the place. When he finished he walked up to the parking lot and changed by his car. No one was there to watch.

 After that, he drove home and there he ate one of those salads, the kind you buy in the supermarket and are already done for you. He was hungrier than a salad but he didn’t want to go out again and eat something else. He instinctively gazed at his arm but he had a shirt on now and didn’t bother to yank up the sleeve or anything. He just finished his salad and then sat in front of the TV and put some silly documentary about aliens. They were always on, always with some crazy theory. They were the best shows for him to sleep to because he didn’t really care what they were all about. He only knew he was really tired.

 When he woke up, the room was in darkness. He looked at his watch and just sat down, covered his face and then stood up. It was time to go to the gym. Once he got there, he realized he was too tired. He tried several machines in a very short time but he just couldn’t do much on any of them. He didn’t know if he was tired from his earlier workout or if he was just not in the mood to do any exercise. Even though he clearly wanted to leave, he made himself stay at least an hour. He didn’t wanted to waste time, even if he preferred to be home reading or watching TV or doing whatever else felt more attractive than being in a gym, not being able to do much. Again, in that place no one really looked at him and he luckily wore a sleeve shirt too. Somehow he had never been a sleeveless shirt type of guy. He just wasn’t many things…

 When he finally came out of the gym, he intended to go and eat another salad in his home but he chose, instead, to go and walk around for a while. He was very close to home but he didn’t wanted to go there just yet. He wanted to think for a while or maybe not think at all. He just wanted to keep moving because when he stayed still he began torturing himself and he didn’t wanted that at all. He walked looking at the people going up and down the street, some were alone and others were in couples or even in groups. Some seemed happy and others not so much. Some were in a hurry and others just sat in the benches and just were there, not doing much more than looking at the cars and at the people, like him.

 He stopped to check out many store windows, some of them selling toys, others videogames or home appliances or even art. The street on which the gym was located, the same that passed near his house, was very commercial and active. And as the night progressed, more and more people popped all over the place, entering bar and restaurants, greeting people with hugs or only a cold handshake. It was Saturday night after all and everyone was out and about, no one wanted to be alone at home and he was certainly one of those. Normally he wouldn’t really care but this time was different. He felt he needed to stay outside for the remainder of the night because if he went back home he would do the same thing he did every time his thoughts cornered him.

  People never really watched, never really cared. They always excused themselves on a false sense of modesty or on a fake respect that no one ever asked of anyone. When he exercised in the gym the first few months he had a trainer. She was very strong and beautiful. He knew she saw the marks on his forearms, on his forehead. They were difficult not to look at if one really thought about it but she never mentioned anything and they saw each other everyday for at least three months. How could she not say anything? Did she really not mind or was she appealing to that false sense of respect that no one ever asked for? It’s not that he wanted to be asked but at the same time he did, he needed to be recognized.

 But no one had ever asked, no one had ever been interested. Besides he was very good at curing himself, he knew how to do it in order for anyone to miss the obvious marks. But nevertheless, they were obvious and anyone could have seen the problems, what was bubbling below his surface, that emotionless face and the stretch marked arms and the tired body. Everyone knew but no one cared. He was aware with that everywhere he went, even in that street, walking among people that seemed to be having an ice time with each other, that looked like they couldn’t care less about what happened beyond that place.

 He stopped at a small park and realized he had passed his home several blocks ago. He turned around but as he did, a voluptuous figure appeared in front of him. He didn’t really want to have that interaction, not then. It is common that the only people that see those in the shadows are people in the shadows themselves and these people really were. The police, the city officials and the neighbors all knew about it but no one really did anything to prevent it. Prostitutes had taken over and had taken the park as their place to work and get work. The lamps were not as bright as they could have been and some places were just very dark at night. Not only prostitutes hid in the shadows and he knew that well.

 Before she could offer him anything, he told her he wasn’t interested. She walked closer, in order to get in his way. She was very tall and had very strong legs and a wide chest and back. But she had the most luxurious head of hair he had ever seen on a prostitute. He repeated himself, told her he wasn’t interested. She then explained what she could do for him, what she liked to do and what he might like to do. She got neared but he took a step back. She smiled and he didn’t and she put a hand on his shoulder. It was a heavy hand and he felt as if he had sunken a couple of centimeters because of that hand. She assured they would have the best time ever and that she wouldn’t charge him too much. But the think her arm, pulled her hand off him and told her he wasn’t interested.

 This time he walked away and heard the prostitute insulting him and saying a bunch of derogatory terms, one after the other. She was like a machine of insults and, it had to be said, she was very creative about it. He tried not to hear any more that meant that he had a small penis and just walked home as fast as he could. It was late and the weather outside got very cold without him noticing. When he got home he took off his gym clothes and put on a pajama. Again, he turned on the TV and tried to watch some documentary about sharks, then a movie about some teenagers lost in an island and finally some cartoons. But the thought was already there and he couldn’t get the image out of his head. He had to do it, he had no option.

 Hours later, he was in his bed, head on the pillow looking up but with his eyes wide open. He was shaking and his arms were slightly opened, as if he was playing to be an angel of sorts in his own bed. But it wasn’t an angel one would have thought of when looking at the large blood stains in the blankets. They were rapidly expanding, forming the wings of the possible angel. But no real angel could have been found there. He closed his eyes to sleep and, this time, he cried again. He understood this was the day in which it finally got to him, in which he lost his grip on everything. He was finally lost and there was no one that could save him. Then again, there was no one at all.

Alone in the desert

   There was no wind. Only the heat and the sand that was very soft and in which her feet sunk deep, making every step very difficult to make. She had been holding her shoes on one hand but suddenly decided to drop them and let the sand claim them. She might never return to that beautiful hotel she had been staying in and even if she did, she had more shoes there, where they could actually be used.

 She stopped walking sometimes and tried to compose herself, looking in every direction; desperate to get any sign of life or of the person she had been following. Suddenly, she saw a scorpion come out of the sand and just ran the opposite way, not minding the heat, the sand and the fact that she had to climb a really big sand dune to escape the small creature.

 It was on top of that sand structure that she saw the oasis that the woman she had encountered in the market had told her about. Or at least it seemed to be it, because all of those water springs in the desert looked the same and she couldn’t forget that she might be imagining the whole thing, her mind already being affected by the heat and by having walked around a very still desert for at least an hour now.

 Once she made it to the oasis, she realized it was real and just when straight for the water. The small pool of liquid that was there was no good for swimming but good enough for her feet to relax and have a well deserved rest. She also took some water in her hands and drank, feeling how her body thanked her for it. As she drank, she looked around. Besides that small pond, there were only three palm trees, a few rocks and that was it. It was a very small island of life in the immensity of the desert.

 She started thinking that maybe she needed to go back but then she realized she had no idea what “back” meant as her senses of direction was not precisely on point. She had her cellphone with her but, obviously, it had no signal and the map feature wasn’t working. So she just there, here a soft breeze that brushed through those parts and moved the leaves of the palm trees.

 But the sound also moved something the woman had failed to see. Just in front of her there was the pond, and after that one of the palm trees but the wind made her notice some sort of fabric that was caught behind the palm tree. She stood up slowly and then realized she really needed to open her eyes better because what lay in front of her was not just fabric, it was a women dressed in a black gown, barefoot, apparently passed out, just there in the sand as if it was the most normal thing of Earth. She thought the woman looked beautiful but also a bit scary.

 Her body was very still. The other woman came closer and noticed she had a beautiful bracelet on her right arm and a necklace made also from gold. The bracelet had a name on it: Desi. She concluded that her companion’s name was Desi and that someone had left her there, because she was so perfectly put on the ground that it wouldn’t be possible that she had fainted and just assumed that very calm position.

 Desperate for human communication, the woman touched Desi’s face and caressed it a little bit too hard in order to wake her up but it didn’t work. She also tried shaking him by the elbow and the shoulder, even going to the extent of doing it really strongly, but without success. The last thing she tried was tickling her sleeping companion’s feet with her fingertips but the body didn’t even move a millimeter.

 So the woman just sat there besides her sleeping, or maybe dead, companion and just stared at the pond and the palm trees, secretly begging for an answer to this ridiculous situation. She even attempted to remember what it was that had drawn her out of her suite into the desert but the only thing she could remember was the voice of the woman in the market, telling her to find that oasis she was in right now, and wait for a revelation to occur. Maybe that was the place where she was destined to know a great truth but, being honest to herself, she didn’t want to know any truths if it meant being in the middle with nowhere with a dead body.

 She shook Desi violently this time but the body wouldn’t budge so she decided she didn’t care. Also, she decided to go back to her hotel and just hope that the same voice that brought her there was capable to get her back into a nice bed and a continental breakfast. She had been out of bed before dawn and she felt dusk was about to take place and she certainly didn’t want to spend a night in a place filled with scorpions.

 So she just stood up and started walking the way she thought her hotel was located in. Her steps were more secure now and the sand didn’t engulf her feet as it had been doing before. She almost floated over the sand and walked with much more grace than anyone else could in such an awful place. She reached a high dune and decided to look back; in order to give a last look to dead Desi but the oasis wasn’t there anymore. There was only sand.

 It was the first time that she felt scared and that feeling was accentuated by the fact that the sun was less and less bright, and she could already see the moon in the sky, very bright and all of her features visible. The moon seemed massive in the desert and she found herself looking at it for a long time before she remembered her wish to go back to the hotel.

 She walked and walked. But couldn’t reach any place. She was now thirsty and no oasis awaited her in the route she had chosen. She just had to keep on walking but she wasn’t walking as secure as she had been walking before. Her feet were starting to sink again and she felt very insecure about every single step she took. It was very sudden when fear took over her mind: she was sure she was going to die there, all alone, cold and with a thousand scorpions and other creatures of the desert poking her lifeless body, Her mouth would fill with sand before her whole body was to be covered by the desert, forgotten by the world there.

 It was a bright light that made these thoughts go away. But the light had been just a flash, just a moment in time that she never saw again. She kept walking and decided to travel only on the crests of the tall dunes in order to have a vantage point and not be surprised by death, if it came from beneath her. But it was there, the moon almost in the highest part of the sky, that she saw her again.

 She recognized the dress and her face and ever her feet, there in the dark. The moon illuminated Desi and that beautiful blue light bathed her in a strange aura that made the woman feel scared but also very calm. It was as if her mind was screaming but her body was incapable of acting on that fear. She was kind of paralyzed, also fascinated by the fact that the woman she had seen earlier was there, looking at her.

 But none of them moved. Not until Desi took off her necklace and let it fall into the sand. Then, a gust of gust covered her body and she was never seen again. She had been an illusion or maybe a dead person. That was why the lost woman had not been able to wake her up. She walked to the spot where she had been standing and grabbed the necklace from the sand. Just like the bracelet, it had a charm with a name. And the name was Florence.

 It was right then that she opened her eyes and realized the desert was there, just beyond the windows in her room. Her grandiose bedroom was there, all the complimentary beverages, the fruit basket that had been given to her as a gift and all of her clothes and shoes. Florence just touched her face and the rest of her body, trying to understand what had just happened. She stood up and went to the bathroom. She checked her eyes and her mouth. And then she just looked at her reflection.

 And as it happens often, she forgot Desi’s name, and the scorpions, and the body in the oasis. But she didn’t forget the fact that she had dropped some shoes in the desert, that she had found a necklace with her name on it or that a voice had called from beyond.

 She cleaned her face with cold water and decided to get some breakfast but, just as she walked in the space between the window and the bed, Florence stepped on a small mound of desert sand.

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.