She hoped that if she switched on the radio during her drive home from the library that some deejay named after an exotic fruit or bath and body product might play tortured love songs that could recognize the pain in her. Alas, the only functioning radio station in her car played peppy Bruno Mars songs and club jams by Ke$ha. She needed Adele, and considering Adele’s level of radio play, her absence was insulting.
She knew that she couldn’t be angry and sad for much longer, noting that her level of emotion was heightening to the point of irrationality. It just wasn’t becoming. Becoming was all she had left.
More importantly, since she had spent last night weeping and stuffing her face, she only had one day left to make her deadline.
Mina dragged her bitter butt up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, cursing her landlord’s lack of professional initiative to fix the elevator with the little breath she could muster. To distract herself from the physical demand of climbing, she counted the amount of days, months… years, since she had been to the gym. August 24, 2010… she had a strongly worded conversation with her reflection about her physical well-being and then drove the two miles to the gym in the only yoga pants she owned that did not have holes in the crotch. She ran for twenty-five minutes, lifted fifteen pounds of iron on a bench press, and sat on that strange, weighted sex machine that made you flap your inner thighs like a horny moth. She had a strange fantasy that the overt “come hither” nature of the exercise might win the attention of the beautiful, bronze man that was doing pull-ups in her direction.
She fantasized about how he might approach her. He would notice her beautiful, almond eyes from across the room, so struck by them he would lose count of the amount of pull-ups he was doing and be thrown off his whole circuit. He would awkwardly approach her outside of the gym on her way to the elevator, nervously run his fingers through that thick, black mane of his. On their first date, they would go to a Parisian-inspired coffee shop around mid-afternoon and spend the whole day talking and laughing, losing track of time. The owner would be so struck by their obvious chemistry and would keep the shop open just for them until midnight. Then he would walk her to her apartment, hurl her against the front door, and kiss her passionately. He would admit that he was already falling in love with her and invite her to come with him to his yacht to look at the stars.
In reality, he looked at himself for about ten minutes and then retired to the locker room. Soul-crushing. Mina mourned their would-be relationship all the way home and perhaps, more unfortunately, she never went back to that gym.
Disillusionment and misplaced hope is what ended her potentially revolutionary body makeover. Ok fine, it was sheer laziness, but wasn’t it so much better to blame someone else? At this juncture, considering her lack of physical fitness, the end might be closer than she had imagined. Anyway, was this going to be her life? Fat, alone, and in a perpetual state of irritation—always to be bested by the next flight of stairs?
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