Her running shoes were the one to blame. All she needed was to make the decision to get her life back in track and they would immediately hide in a secret corner of the tiny little studio to never be found again.
For the past three years her life was about living off memories of what she used to be, more importantly, memories of what she could have had become. Apparently, at thirty-five years old, it was then too late. "The golden days” were long past, she often recalled.
Lately, it seemed that it was all going south in a spiral of unfortunate events, or of no events whatsoever, which was even more poignant. She firmly believed it was all somehow related to the twenty-something pounds she had gained over the last few years. A couple of months prior, she had woken up in the wee hours of a winter morning and couldn’t get back to sleep anymore, thinking about how lame her life had become.
She developed a habit of feeding melancholy and would go over and over the recollections of her old self. She’d remembered her dancing classes and how her clothes used to fit; she’d smirk, recalling how offended she used to get by construction workers hitting on her. She’d often evoke memories of walking naked back and forth around that same little apartment, just to gaze at the mirrors every time she passed by one. She’d open her skinny drawer and stare at how tiny her tank tops, shorts, skirts used to be. She’d go over every detail of that last time she was kissed - she could have never guessed that was to be her last kiss for what it felt like a lifetime by then. Old days she used to get excited about friendly gatherings and social events, excited about showing herself off.
Truth was, she had become frightened of personal encounters, always fearing the same old small-talk questions about her current life, current status, current goals. She remembered her old dreams and all the certainties she used to have about her future; about herself. Who was that pale chubby girl with the sad eyes in the mirror? Since when her idea of excitement became a bag of kettle corn, or Twinkles, or Twizzlers, or pretty much anything sweet enough to counterbalance her emptiness? And please, let's not forget the damn sitcoms; it was hard to understand how much she liked them… Overall, it was really about getting her mind busy with anything frugal enough to take the focus away from her own short comings.
That was her life in a nutshell: a mindless routine of recurring non-sense. At the office, her morning excitement was to look forward to the 10am mail drop-off, which meant that half of the morning was gone. Then it was lunch in two more languid hours. She’d open the cold plastic tupperware with some pasta she cooked the night before and reheated it for two minutes and twenty-seven seconds in the microwave. She’d eat alone in the white kitchen table, separating the excess of the sauce to the sides of the plate. She’d read the Classifieds, promising herself the three years in the mortgage office were still only temporary. She would finish eating on time to make sure she could load the dishwasher with everyone’s sloppiness before getting back to the front desk at 1pm sharp. She’d then get back to her PC desktop trying to excite herself about the possibility of new emails non work-related. As usual, even her Facebook account was yet untouched by any friendly encounters. The rest of the afternoon would move in turtle-time, stretching each of its seconds in its sadistic way.
She’d stare at the wall clock by the front door, watching its ticking, praying for one more day of work to be done; one less day of her life to be gone. Technically, her weekdays were a succession of wasted seconds summing seventy-two hundred minutes, in which all she wanted was to be over with it. Then, the next twenty-eight hundred and eighty minutes that the weekend consisted of, mostly felt like a blur of food and TV. Years would fly by in slow clock ticks. The last time-passer of the day was waiting for the Fedex pick-up at 4pm. She knew that after that it was only one more hour and she’ll be seating in her rusty red 1989 Kia, listening to KissFM and smoking her light GPC cigarette in the jammed LA traffic.
She would stop by the Armenian Liquor Store by her street corner, get her usual night snacks and wonder how much longer would it take her to start getting into the big bottle of rum on the top shelf of the mirrored store wall and become an alcoholic simply out of boredom. She would then think about her auntie Gertrude that died of cirrhosis - she was miserable, yes she was - but at least it didn’t seem that she was sober enough to realize it too often. That was it, she just wished she could ignore all the pathetic positivism and happiness that resided all the way deep into her core and just live miserably-ever-after without minding it. But no, she had to have her freaking consciousness making her feel guilty as hell for her self-abandonment.
Her nights were pretty blank. No voice messages in the machine, no mail but bills, no friends wondering how was her day, no late booty calls. Her fat old cat would always vanish unless there was some nasty canned food involved, and her mom was even more depressed and disappointed at her own life than she was, so that was a weekly call she tended to dread. Her couch was ripping its leather and her bedsprings would squeak every time she breathed. Books would require too much thinking and they had the ultimate risk of inspiring an atomic bomb inside her chaos within, which she desperately refrained from facing. She actually refrained from any strong emotions unless they were related to someone else’s reality; mostly reality shows.
She often tried to grasp when she had started being such a hater. The same girls that used to motivate her to be better swiftly became instant envy triggers. Hot girls started to arouse anger out of her. She would despise their hotness and justify it by thoughts about their apparent superficiality, due to the hours they’d certainly wasted in a stupid gym and a salon just to look that way - I mean, get a life, right? Just like she did.
Once in a blue moon she would have porn dreams. She’d wake up with the taste of cum in her tongue and try to relive every moment of it. She’d shut her eyelids in an attempt to fall back into sleep, begging for the dream not to be done. She’d wish she could have those every night, they really felt just like reality, or how that reality should feel at least. She was used to fantasizing about some men she crossed paths with, however she couldn’t truly imagine any of them ever being attracted to her.
That’s how she first got into online dating. Unfortunately, she had lost her faith on EHarmony. She went in six frustrated dates with the random guys from the pictures, in which she awkwardly tried to only expose the best of herself. She dressed just as that article on Cosmopolitan had said a woman should dress for a first date: casual and sexy, without being vulgar or looking like she wasted too much time to put herself together, that “I happened to wake up looking this good” look. She would get to her date fashionably late, seeming overly busy - as advised - and always notice how old the posted pictures of the guys must have been. She liked to think she still had some dignity left to only post current pictures - “good angle” ones. She would avoid talking about her tragedies and misfortunes; she’d in fact watch out about talking at all, always fearing saying too much. But overall, she would avoid over-eating, that was always an easy trap for her to fall into, almost as easy as asking for the to-go box, but come on, that could be perhaps the only tasty meal of a long long time. She’d pay as much attention as possible to what the guy would talk about and she’d try to disguise her disappointment in their shallowness finding something endearing about the guy, even if it was just an earlobe. She’d generally go home feeling a bit raped by her self-exposure, but usually with an aftertaste of “it wasn’t that bad”. Even if she wasn’t entirely attracted to the guy, she always hoped to hear from him; anything but rejection. Still, there was never a second date, not even a call back. It all only made her feel worst about her state of self. All the guys she had met seemed somehow compromised and fucked up anyway, or at least that was the last excuse she could find to regain some kind of self-esteem.
She had tried every Diet under the sky above. South Beach, Atkin, Master Cleanse, the Melon diet, the Brown Rice Diet, the Moon, The Liquids Diet…there were usually great results that would last for a week or so, and then she was right back to her old ways, reassured that she was too old for a permanent body change. She wondered sometimes if she was somehow subconsciously setting herself to failure with those strict regimes and unrealistic goals, but she’d quickly erase those thoughts out of her mind, concerned about getting too deep into her own secrets. Little by little, she took away the mirrors that used to reside on her walls, only leaving behind that half-body one that made her torso and face look really thin, it must have been the angle.
That night she was daydreaming about PinkBerry, about two blocks away from her place: too close for a car ride, too far to walk in her Pajamas. She wasn’t much into walking, especially because she tended to feel watched by the cars driving by. Everything but attention. She battled with herself for about four of her favorite weekly TV shows duration, over getting out of her stationary mode. She really wanted some frozen yogurt she thought, she wanted as bad as a toddler wants his breast-fed milk; she needed it.
She decided to walk out of her door just as she was dressed: lose polyester navy-blue pants, gray college sweatshirt, pink socks and purple Crocs. I mean, it wasn’t like she was going to run into someone or something, it was just two blocks walk after all.
It was a warm spring night. The sidewalks were completely empty and the streetlights looked cold. She was safe, no pedestrians in sight for the next two blocks.
She was running for a bit over forty-five minutes by then. She had taken out her tank top - which was soaked by sweat - and was left to her shorts and sports bra running up Sunset Boulevard. When tired, her IPod music would fuel her to set a stronger pace. She would run every night after long consuming days at work. She loved her job and looked forward to leaving all the stress behind over wide strides. Her breath would sometimes try to trick her into feeling overly exhausted but she knew her legs could move for at least a couple more hours. She enjoyed practicing that self-control. She would run with no exact route or destiny, run to undress all her hang-ups, run to clear her mind. Overall, she was happy. She was finally starting to feel like she was accomplishing the goals she set for herself for so long. She knew there was no ending line; it was about self-realization. All she wanted was to improve; she wanted to improve her mind as much as her body. Running was her therapy. She liked to run in busy streets, she enjoyed thinking about the people staring at her from their cars while driving back from work - the ones unhappy and overwhelmed. She would run the sidewalks against the up-coming traffic just so she could be observed face to face. She wanted to be looked at, to be admired, to be recognized. She could feed off jealousy and envy with no qualms, but overall, she truly believed she could somehow be an inspiration to them, just as a random runner once inspired her. Truth was, she was proud of herself. About to hit thirty-six and her body was close to the best shape of her life, her job was fulfilling and her boyfriend had learned through the last years to become the best man one could ask for. She had grown into an accomplished and content woman and in a beautiful relationship. Who could have imagine after all…It didn’t matter anymore, that’s who she was now. She was exactly who she wanted to be.
She was running with rhythm up Sunset. A girl jaywalked to her sidewalk a couple of blocks away, slowly heading her way.
She looked down at her pink socks shining through the circled holes of her Crocs. “Jeez, I’m hopeless,” she thought for a second. “Sidewalks are such a filthy thing,” she drifted. She looked up and saw a girl about two blocks away running toward her. “Oh, no…a runner. That’s all I need right now. Great. Here she comes...No way this girl is in fucking shorts and sports bra! No fucking way…come on, it’s still spring! Oh, and there you go, see, I knew it! I can tell already: the girl is ridiculously hot. Yeah, yeah, don’t cross the street please, come my way, come right at me, make me feel like the villain-cowboy-horse-shit one more time, please do it. I’m probably chemically addicted to it by now anyway.” She breathed heavily. She felt intimidated. She felt sad, really sad. Her eyes filled with dense tears. She was overflowing. She looked down. She wanted to melt into dirt; she wanted to morph into an ant, cockroach, anything invisible to that reality running right into her. She had thousands flashbacks of her old body, old smile, old strength, old ways. She suddenly felt an intrinsic feeling of self that could change easy tides into grand storms. She unexpectedly wanted to face the girl. She wanted to stare at every piece of her like a scientific study and see inside her aspirations. She wanted to see the girl's reflection in her mirror. She wanted to transcend their two bodies into one, and from that moment, become only the best of herself. She wanted to change.
They were now steps away from each other. She couldn’t help. She looked into the girl and the girl’s eyes locked right into hers. The girl’s ponytail was swinging side to side while her body bounced with the strong strides against the sidewalk. She stared straight into the girl’s abyss and saw the bowels of her own destiny. She looked at the girl's features and it was her own face.
She stopped. It all became a blur. There was no other girl. She froze in awe for what it could have been seconds or hours. It hit her. She turn around and started walking fast pace back to her place.
Enough was enough; she knew where her running shoes were.
