By the gym

   Mario entered the gym when he was fifteen and never looked back. He trained day and night, before and after school and it went like that for years. Even when he got a job and more responsibilities, he still managed to head to the gym at least twice a day and even more time on the weekends. He was so dedicated to it that people of the gym had asked him several times if he would be their spokesperson or if he could replace trainers that were sick or late. And he did both that stuff, which made him mildly famous in the circuit of people who were obsessed with perfect bodies.

 For Mario, it had been the stability and discipline required which had been the hook to enter the gym. He had nothing of that at home, only two parents fighting for everything and largely ignoring him. It wasn’t very difficult to ask them for the money to join the gym, as they would always say yes just to make a point of how great they were as parents. When he was in his last year, Mario had already grown a couple of more inches and exercise had paid off with a body most girls wanted to date and most guys wanted to have. He was in the school’s soccer team and also in the swimming team. People thought he was obsessed with being the center of attention or that he did it because he was great. The truth was he just wanted to be out of the house as long as he could.

 He dated the most beautiful girl in school for prom and went on to model for various brands in order to help pay his college. His parents had split by then so the money had become a bit scarce. His modeling gigs were very needed in order to buy all that he needed in order to be successful as a business administrator. He wanted to put up his own gym and needed to understand every aspect of the business to be successful. In college, every girl was also attracted to him and they were all very forward about their intentions of dating him. But Mario was very focused and was only interested in finishing school as fast as he could to make his dreams come true.

 Sure enough, he got his degree at least a year earlier than usual. He started making enquiries about what was exactly needed to put up a gym. But he realized that his dream was still too far away as he needed a lot of money to open up his own place. The machines, the implements, the salaries of the trainers, the rent of the space… Everything was costly and Mario had barely had money to pay his tuition. Actually, he was still in debt with college. So the only reasonable thing to do was to look for a decent paying job and stay there for a while until he had the amount of money necessary to make his dreams come true.

 He continued to model whole working in an accounting company. All of his coworkers recognized him from several energy drinks campaigns or maybe even from his work as a swimsuit and underwear model. Again, it was the women who seem mostly interested. Some of them would stare for long periods of time during lunch and others would leave him notes and candy bars on his desk, usually with love letters about how beautiful he was. He always threw the candy and read the letters back home, sometimes laughing but usually thinking about his life. After all, he had never had a serious relationship and now that he was a bit older he seemed to be getting late to be with someone else.

 You see, Mario was still a virgin, even after graduating high school. He had been so focus on so many other things, that he never found the time. That sounds funny but it was what happened. He didn’t regret it but now, leaving on his own, he felt sometimes very much alone. He sometimes talked his each one of his parents but they would always talk and talk about their issues and never ask him about how he was doing or if he need everything. It was sad but he always called them on the first and second day of the month. It was something he scheduled in advance because he didn’t really cared about it. He had realized too that his love for his parents was not very high.

 One day, on those mornings he woke up at five AM to head for the gym. In the lobby, he accidentally pushed a guy that was delivering some of the goods sold at he gym’s cafeteria. The guy yelled at him, put back his cap as it had fallen on the floor with the push and moved past him towards the street. He had never seen someone so angry and he did think that the man could use some time at the gym. Then he realized he had checked the guy put, from his funny colored shoes to his kaki shorts, blue polo shirt and cap that had the logo of the company he worked for. Oddly enough, Mario couldn’t stop thinking about that encounter and his reaction for the next few hours, until work made him forget.

 Things were getting harder there as they were all being pushed into working more as the company had been bought by a bigger one and they had been advised they would be laying off people very soon. They all wanted to prove their worth by working like mules and Mario was no exception. Without that job, he wouldn’t be able to pay his bills and save a bit of money for his gym. He couldn’t afford that so he worked tirelessly for more hours and even on weekends from home. He had even cut off his hours in the gym but still went there every day as he was paid occasionally to coach someone who asked for it.

 One of those stressful days, he ran into the guy of the cap again. He was talking to the gym’s receptionist. Apparently he had already delivered his goods but the truck had to leave him there for a while, as they needed to get more energy drinks than usual. He removed his cap and revealed a head full of bright chestnut colored hair. It made his brown eyes look even bigger and his smile nicer. His smile? Mario realized he had been standing still for a while, staring at the man in a cap. He turned and faced Mario, walk up to him and said “Yes?”. Every single color in Mario’s face faded and he almost dropped his backpack to the ground. Then, the guy with the cap in his hand smiled and extended a hand. He said his name was Tim and that he was sorry for the way he reacted the other day.

 Mario was a bit relieved but not really nerves free. He was shaking a bit when he shook hands with Tim, even sweating a little. Tim asked him if he was an instructor but Mario only managed to shake his head in a negative way. Then a car horn was heard from the street: it was the truck that had come back for Tim. He said goodbye and left fast. The receptionist was looking at Mario so he headed for the locker room and changed there as he thought about what had just happened.

 By that afternoon, he forgot everything about Tim as the news of five people getting laid off was told to him as he entered the office. Luckily, he wasn’t one of them but the tension was starting to show. For some days now he had been growing dark circles around his eyes and he hadn’t been eating very well. The worst part was that they still threatened to fire even more people so there was no way to stop making efforts and trying not get canned. Besides that, he had received a letter from college where he was asked to pay even more than usual do to an error in their system. He called to complain but to no use. He had to pay or they would use the law to make him do it. Of course, the law was on their side.

 Worried about his future, he decided not to go to the gym that afternoon. It was the first time in a very long time. He just went home and had an early night. He didn’t want to think about anything and he didn’t care if people were calling him because of a modeling commitment or just to annoy him. He wasn’t in the mood to have any human contact. He just wanted a magical way to get his life on track, as it seemed it was heading to a cliff. He knew he couldn’t keep working like that unless he wanted a heart attack but he needed the job now more than ever.

 Bored and unable to sleep properly, he took his computer and tried to play a game or listen to some music but nothing helped his mood. He entered Facebook and checked out some old pictures and then realized he could look for the guy in the cap. The idea just appeared in his head and he just wrote Tim. Then he tried to remember his last name. It was in his shirt… Diaz. Yes, that was it. He wrote the whole thing and checked the results. Number seven was he, or so it seemed. The profile picture wasn’t him but the character of an old cartoon Mario had watched when younger. The profile said he worked for Nutrition Services, which was the name of the company that delivered every day to the gym. Mario breathed out and wrote him a message. A simple “Hello. I’m Mario”.

 He so nervous he jumped out of bed and started walking around. But then the sound was heard and they begun chatting. They spent several hours talking about everything Mario had wanted to talk for years. He didn’t care about the gym or work at that moment. He felt happy, at ease and not under pressure. Before they logged off, Mario asked Tim if they could have a coffee after work and Tim said yes. His smile while falling asleep was priceless, as it was what he needed, what he had always needed, to achieve long time his goals.

The hell within

   Ariana had been eating exactly the same, nothing different. She may have been trying a new trail mix, a different cereal and had a little more water in her diet but nothing else was different. Her doctor assured her it wasn’t a nutritional thing. Nevertheless, something had triggered nightmares in her sleep. Every single night she would have a different one and it was not getting better. She had been spending many nights with no sleep and that had started to affect her work.

 She was a model. Her agent would book her for several runways gigs in department stores or for any kind of brand. She would also model for artistic photographers and for several advertisement campaigns involving anything from sunglasses to miniskirts. Ariana had made a name for herself in the fashion world but that was beginning to change, as the nightmares got worse.

 When she had them, she would normally sleep for too long. One would think fear would awaken her but that didn’t happen. She just stayed there, sweating and moaning in physical pain. Then, when she finally woke up, she would normally be late for some appointment so they would hire another girl. The situation got so much worse; she lost half of her jobs in a month. Her agent, a woman called Susan, tried everything. They went to a doctor, a herbalist, a nutritionist, to the gynecologist and even to one of those crooks than cleanses people’s auras.

 Nothing worked. So they finally tried with a psychiatrist. Ariana was not very enthusiastic about it but went with Susan. She’d rather go there that keep losing work and money. The doctor asked her several questions about her family and her personal life but also about the dreams themselves. It was funny, but Ariana couldn’t really remember anything about them. She only recalled parts, feeling, maybe some images but that was it. The doctor said this was normal and asked her if she would accept to do an experiment with him. She agreed.

 The psychologist had two different plans. The first one, the easiest one, was for her to stay in a hospital, under care, so they could monitor their sleep. The doctor and his assistant would check on her sleep rhythm and maybe that way they could guess what was wrong with her. She thought it was a good idea and shook the doctor’s hand, hopeful he would find whatever was causing all of this.

 As the days went by, waiting for the experiment to be done, Ariana kept working. She had mostly photo-shoots, which were never scheduled too early and were kind of relaxing to her. The only thing was that the makeup girl had to put a second layer of everything to make her look presentable. She would hope it wouldn’t be obvious on the pictures but did her job anyway, faking smiles and poses. The truth was she didn’t want to do anything anymore. She felt worried and sick but also exhausted and in need of real calm sleep.

 The following weekend she went into the hospital and greeted Doctor Pike. He and his assistant would stay in one room as she slept in the one next door. They would monitor her with electrodes on her head and the rest of her body and also with video cameras on the bedroom. Ariana was very tired but even so it took her a while to fall asleep. Something in her brain told her it wasn’t a good idea to submit herself to the horrors of the nightmares, once again. But she didn’t want a life like that anymore. She wanted to sleep like a normal person. So, after a few hours, she finally closed her eyes and got to sleep.

 The doctor watched closely as she fell asleep and once she was indeed sleeping, they started to detect something odd. There was a part of her brain that was very active. To be precise, it had activated when she had fallen asleep. And it was sending messages all over the body. The nightmare began as Ariana began moving a lot on the bed. She would moan and pant and sweat profusely. Her brain waves were off the charts at some point but then would calm and come up again after a few minutes. Doctor Pike thought it was amazing that her body was not awaking her. Her body had no answer to the pain the nightmare was causing.

 They watched Ariana for hours until, finally, she woke up. They told her they had wanted to wake her up but they decided that wouldn’t have been a very good idea. Ariana was not looking good at all: her skin was kind of green, her lips had lost all color and she seemed dizzy, not quite there. They decided to give her a nice breakfast for her to recuperate some strength and then they send her home to relax. In her home, Susan made her some soup and left her alone to be more at ease.

 Ariana, of course did not sleep. She decided to distract herself with her computer or with magazines but she realized she couldn’t really read or pay attention to anything. Her body was numb, exhausted and deprived of energy. She had some soup and loved it, as it gave her some warmth. It felt just right, as she wanted to feel when sleeping. She wanted to go back to sleep, her body craving for it but she fought against it. She didn’t want the dreams to come back to her; she didn’t want to die from this. What if she fell asleep and it drained all of her energy? She would become a zombie, a shadow of what Ariana had once been.

 She fought the need to sleep bravely but ultimately, she passed out on the floor. She hit her head hard against the hardwood floor and was found by Susan that night, as she came to check on her. Ariana was rushed to the hospital. Doctor Pike came by too and asked the doctors treating her to tell him about her state. They told him they had too realized something was wrong with her brain. The blow to her head had rendered it erratic so they decided to induce her into coma. The doctor told them about her nightmare problems but they assured him nothing was going on with her besides the brain trauma. She was not dreaming, only in deep sleep.

 Doctor Pike realized this was true when he visited her with Susan, who told her that Ariana’s parents lived in another country and were trying to get there fast but plane tickets where difficult to find. As the doctors had said, Ariana was calm. She wasn’t moving nor sweating. She was sleeping like any normal person would. The doctor then told them that they had detected a brain tumor growing slowly. Apparently, it had begun affecting many parts of the brain that are not normally active. So now they understood the reason for the nightmares.

 Doctor Pike recalled the time she had told him about the feelings she remembered: changes in temperature, the sensation of being watched, and the presence of at least another human or creature. Was that all a product of the tumor? To doctor Pike, it was all a great mystery because he had never seen anything like it. The images she recalled were also confusing. She had assured him something like the devil, the typical depiction, had been lurking around her dreams. Also some other deformed being and a strange weather, where cold and hot coexisted.

 Ariana was in a coma for a whole month. They extracted the brain tumor with great care and when her parents finally arrived, she woke up. They were all there: her family, her doctors, Pike and Susan. But it wasn’t the happy moment they were expecting. The first thing Ariana did when waking up was yelling and crying profusely. Some nurses tried to calm her down but she wouldn’t. She would push them, jumping off the bed and crying, asking for them to step away. Everyone was very scared. Her parents tried to lure her towards them but she didn’t seem to recognize them.

 Ariana ran out of her room, up and down corridors. Some male nurses tried to catch her but she would bite and kick very hard. They chased her all over until they reached the top floor. She ran up some stairs and got out to the terrace of the building. As the hospital was in the middle of the city, they had built a nice garden for the patients there. It was doctor Pike who caught up with her first and he decided to talk to her from a distance. She looked mad, worried and in state of shock. The doctor told her to tell him what was happening.

-       I saw them! They’re all over. They want to kill us.

-       Who wants to kill us, Ariana?

-       The demons. They are planning to kill us all!

 The doctor walked towards her but she moved back, towards the railing. Then, all other arrived, ready to catch her. No one ever understood why the railing had no protective net. Ariana just climb it and jumped, in front of her parents and everyone who had followed her there. She had jumped from the top of a twelve-story building.

 In her funeral, doctor Pike didn’t talk to anyone else. He was troubled. By what Ariana had said before dying and by the doctor’s final analysis of her brain: a region that normally is not active in humans was active in her brain. They told Pike this region was adjacent to the region responsible of communications. Pike was in deeper inner turmoil than ever before in all his years as a psychiatrist.

Unapologetic

  It wasn’t that he had an urge to be different or something like that. He just like the way the world felt when no clothes were worn. It made him feel alive, as if the pants and shirts he wore for work were just the symbols of a servitude he had never been happy with. He didn’t understood how some people love to wear such clothes but the important thing was that he hated them and, if he had the choice, he would have chosen never to wear them again.

Let’s go back a bit in this story to better understand Nicholas, or Nick, as only his closest friends called him. He didn’t allow anyone he didn’t know to call him Nick; he thought it was just wrong. Two loving parents, which had belonged to the hippie movement back in the sixties and early seventies, raised him like that. He hadn’t been around them at the time, but their choice of living certainly showed some of those things learned in life.

Nowadays they lived in a small farm, taking care of various animals and planting most of their food. They would avoid doctors if they could, and all electronic devices except a cellphone, which made the connection, once every two days, with their son. They would always give him advice on eating healthy and how to be a better human being and Nick took the advice. His friends appreciated his humanity and inherent openness.

Anyway, from his childhood nick had learned to respect all creatures and not to be ashamed of him, both physically and mentally. He was taught the human body is beautiful and that this beauty should always be appreciated and taken care of. And the reinforce this idea, his parents would often take him to the beach to look at people and make him sick that “ugly” rarely meant “hideous”. Most often, it meant, “I don’t like it”; a personal opinion. Respectable but not universal.

Of course, those beaches were nude ones. People would go around without any kind of underwear and, from an early age, he knew that was normal and just played as any other kid on the beach, building castles and bridges and making pits with the salt water. And he enjoyed it thoroughly. For him, his parents were just ideal because they let him do whatever he wanted but just remained him to be responsible. And Nick was smart so it made it a lot easier for them.

Of course, he received a fair share of bullying in school. Because he was so young, he just told everyone about his holidays, like any other little boy or girl did, but when he said he had being in a nudist camp or beach, the kids would laugh at him and the teacher would call his parents, who would explain their views to her, with no success. They would push him and call him names only because he wasn’t ashamed.

That’s when he learned what hypocrisy means. He was a bit older than ten years old when he learned that older men thought often about younger naked women and they were magazines and TV channels showing them, not necessarily being pornographic. And that was ok in general, although not unspoken. But when someone mentioned liking being naked after showering for some minutes, people thought of them was instantly a depraved person and someone to watch out as he or she might become dangerous.

But Nick, now aged thirty-one, knew there was nothing depraved in going to the beach and just not get any tan lines. He was amused that, when a sexual partner asked him how he did to be so evenly tanned and he answered with the truth, such person would get even more aroused. Still, after so many years, it was almost seen as a fetish. For Nick, that wasn’t the case. It was just him being who he was.

If he stayed at home a whole weekend, for example trying to finish up some work or because of the weather, he would always be naked. He showered and took care of himself, so there was nothing really bad about it. If someone visited they would ring before hand to be let into the building so that gave him a couple of minutes to grab some pajama pants and a t-shirt, or something of the sort. And he would be “presentable”.

He did that because he was aware most people were not comfortable with nudity. That’s why, and he said it loudly when drunk, he just loved sex. And it was because he felt free, not only because it felt good or was fun. He just felt more like himself during sex and also when he stayed naked at home alone. He wished it could be like that all the time but, of course, it wasn’t possible.

Nick had learned from his parents, though. When he had time to spare, and only after visiting his parent’s farm, he would go to a nude beach or to a nude camp to fish. He loved fishing too and his father had taught him everything he had learned from his father who was a fisherman, the kind that captures rare crabs or lobsters. The lake was not like the ocean but the teachings were just as effective.

The best about it all was that he had no secrets with his parents. He was absolutely honest with them and they would tell him every problem they would have. He would drive his father to his prostate exams and would laugh with his comments about it afterwards. Same with her mom and her gynecologist appointments, which he loved because of the faces of the other ladies there. Nick, in turn, would tell them about work, love interests and his love for the naked body.

It was obvious they deeply loved each other. Nick’s friends envied this relationship he had with his parents because, as they told him, it wasn’t strange that parents and children became apart with time, as their priorities change and even distances settled in. But most, he knew, had not really being that close with their families when young so, there wasn’t anything to wonder about.

One fun thing about being naked was that some people thought it was fascinating. Some of his best friends knew about it and didn’t mind (as long as he did only in his house) but people he had met randomly or through them would take an interest in it. Nick found that to be kind of awkward but always tried to answer every question as accurately as he could and sometimes even told them to ask a doctor because most questions related to some physical problem, as if you required a special set of physical and mental skills to be naked.

It was Jenna, an older woman who was a teacher of fine arts in a university, who asked him if he could model for her class. At first he said yes but then he recalled the days he had been bullied and pushed around. What if they laughed or stared in an annoying way? He loved being naked but he didn’t like to be the center of attention; one didn’t lead to the other. But he had already said yes so he went and, for once, he did love to be center of attention, even if it was to twenty students trying to draw his body.

Afterwards, he was able to see the pictures the students had painted and he was surprised to see many of them were very talented. He somehow thought students would just try to do something decent but quickly reminded him that artists become artists even before they are aware of it. When he was about the leave, he met another model and talk to him for a while. He was studying architecture and paid his lunches and other expenses with the money he made standing naked in front of the students. He quickly became one new friend.

Nick had known other people that liked nudity before but they would always like it in relation to sex, which he found to be a bit obvious, to easy if you will. Besides, they would vanish fast, after promising to call, to write or to meet again. But with Greg, he had stronger connection: Greg’s mother had been a hippie too and his dad was just the most loving guy one could meet. In his words, his dad loved everyone just because they existed.

So from then on, they would often meet and talk, not necessarily naked. Nick liked to be around someone that understood him and got what he thought of many things. In the holidays they shared a trip to the beach and had a great time. They would even go dancing at night and stay in one of their apartments each time, that was the degree of friendship and trust. Sex? No, it never happened. They were friends. And kept on being friends for a long time after they met, almost all of their lives.

Nick did love being naked but what he liked the most was people. And not any people but the people that made him who he was, who loved him for who he was and who didn’t judged just because for what he liked. Yes, he was a man that loved being naked; he was not ashamed of himself and was unapologetic. But he was also a great friend, a dedicated son, an open mind and one great fisherman.