Not What I Was Promised

Dearest Rachel –

I found myself waking up at barely four o’clock this morning; I’ve no idea why. Rather than simply roll over and go back to sleep, I found myself compelled to head down to the gym in the already slightly muggy (not that I haven’t experienced worse) twilight. Again, I neither know nor understand why; it’s not as if I’m getting the results I want out of it these days. At this point, I’m not actually losing anything in the way of weight; I’m just hovering between the same boundaries I have been since late last year. Sure, it’s on the lower half of those boundaries now, compared to when I was on the ship, but I’m not entirely certain whether that difference might just be because I had to be wearing clothes when I weighed myself in the ship’s gym.

What’s weird is how people I talk to claim that I look like I’ve lost weight since going on that trip, despite the fact that I know better. The scale doesn’t lie, honey (well, it can be made to lie, sure, but I haven’t been fiddling with it to cause it to do so. I wouldn’t want to, number cruncher that I am); I’m about the same as I was when I left. Lars suggests that my weight is shifting around, and turning itself from fat (which is bulkier) to muscle (which is actually heavier in terms of volume). Personally, I’m not seeing that, either; sure, I’ve reduced that keg I used to carry on my gut to a pony keg, but it’s still a long way from being a six pack.

I was promised that, if I worked on my muscle tone, I could look like a Greek god. But every time I get done with a workout, I look at myself in the mirror and I think “wait a minute, nobody told me the deity in question would be Hades.”

I was also reliably informed that the gym was a good place to meet women. That’s not entirely untrue, but most of them are appreciably older than – and almost as handsome as – me, while the younger ones look like they’re here to train for their school’s next cross-country track meet. Needless to say, no matter how attractive this latter group is, it’s plain to me that I’d best not be caught ogling them, despite the fact that it’s entirely possible that some of them are here specifically in order to get an ogle-worthy body (what with swimsuit season being upon us by now). Thankfully, I sweat enough that I have to remove my eyeglasses in order to work out for any appreciable length of time, so it’s not like I can even see them, let alone ogle them. Although I still worry that my squinting might be taken the wrong way at some point.

This is not what I was promised, implicitly, for my efforts.

And yet, I still go. Why?

Well, I suppose there’s not much else to do at that hour of the morning. This isn’t the city that never sleeps; nothing around here will be open for hours yet. But why not go back to bed – or, failing that, why not just scroll through my newsfeed, or set up another prompt on my AI art program? It’s not as if I have to leave the house; who cares if I work out or not?

It’s a tempting question, honey, and one that applies to pretty much everything I decide to do in my life. Why should I bother to write you every day, when I know you’re not going to read any of it? Why should I head across town to work on things at the folks’ house, when I have everything set up such that I could do the same work at home?

In short, why should I bother to do anything at all?

Because if I question any one thing that I make a point of doing on a regular basis, I might as well question everything I do. None of it is any more necessary than anything else, when you come down to it. None of it is going to make any difference in the long run. So why do any of it?

And while I don’t think I have a definitive answer to any of it, there this common sense side of me that insists that if I were to write off literally everything as pointless, and spend the rest of my days doing basically nothing, well… there wouldn’t be many of those days at all, and what there were of them wouldn’t be worthwhile, in any event.

Maybe the things I force myself to do don’t amount to much, honey. Maybe they’re all that’s keeping my sane. Maybe I should, for now, err on the side of caution, and keep up with them, just in case.

And with that having been said, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.