Sand on My Tongue

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins." ~T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

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It happened again last night.

No matter how many times I hit "repeat" — no matter how many times I began the same song, over and over — I could scarcely hear a word of it before my mind was a million miles from my feet.

And then, later, lifting, I retired my music to my gym bag and still found myself wandering from machine to machine with my wits everywhere but about me.

I was zoning out on people:

The petite girl with a long ponytail and a body she's worked hard for, flirting with her personal trainer (he was blushing, avoiding eye contact as if to acknowledge the contrast between appropriateness and desire).

The thin man standing guard over a machine as a female friend lifted the bar to her chest, and then up again. He held his hands just inches from it — never touching it, never touching her — but I could tell (in the way that our eyes so often betray us) that he wanted to. That he wanted to rest his arms on her shoulders until she turned to him and smiled.

And so it goes, like Tantalus in his pond.

But there were the Eleanor Rigbys, too. The people who not only work out alone... but also appear quite lonely.

Like the obese man out of breath by his tenth calorie (I see the desperation on his face — feel it — as he turns down the speed and wipes the sweat from his brow). Or the female in her late 30s or early 40s who lifted a braided band over and around her shoulders, carrying more weight than I'd ever dare to attempt.

There was a resigned anger on her face — no, sadness — as she pulled the band, again and again, her baggy shirt and shorts just as telling as her clinched jaw and distant stare.

I imagine circumstances for all of these people. The abusive husbands, the unfaithful spouse. The sneers of co-workers or the children caught in-between.

I wanted to tell these people — all of them — that everything will be all right.

But I know better.

And then there was this girl I caught mid-way to the locker room, staring empty through semi-translucent glass. Long gray sweat pants that are anything but stylish; sweat trapped in a shirt that read, quite simply, "EXIST." Her gaze defeated: searching for everything and finding nothing.

Tell me that's not me. She thinks. Tell me I'm not one of them.

But she knows better.

And so she walks, left and then right. Left and then right. No cause but to return home, shower, and hope that — by the time the opportunity presents itself — she might still retain fragments of a thought. Enough fragments, she hopes — after the traffic lights, after the honked horns, after the cat's meow and the shaved legs and the oatmeal dinner — that there will be enough.

Still enough.

To say.