The Two Months Between My Vacations
Memories of forty mile per hour blizzards barely obscure memories of lonely night after lonely night. From the day of my return from Taiwan until the day I left for a vacation in America, snow fell. Drifts piled ever higher along roads, and cold seeped deeper into my soul with each passing day.
Sometime during these endless snowy nights, salvation appeared in the form of a few friends. Refugees from loneliness and Japanese unfriendliness, we watched movies and fed our darkened souls with heavy meals of western delicacies. Pizza, fajitas and pasta carbonara lifted our hearts and expanded our waists.
With vacation to Maui sailing along my calendar horizon, I joined the gym. Twenty minutes drive along white-out roads brings me to this bastion of sanity. One room, six hundred square feet. Seven Nautilus machines, six bikes, two treadmills and 2 stairmasters. Aerobics classes blast J-pop dance music while un-athletic Japanese pedal bicycles to nowhere. The gym attendant, bored and paid to be social, demonstrates 70's era stretches and exercises to respectful, wide-eyed housewives. A rack of dumbells sits gathering dust in a corner. None over ten kilos, twenty-two pounds.
In the next room, a pool. Filled with screaming children and swim-team obsessed teens until six-thirty, the pool empties for water aerobics and lap swim by seven. Twenty-five meters by twenty-five meters, my body comes into its own. Shoulders and triceps radiate heat. Sweat breaks and dissolves in the pool. After a thousand meters, I climb from the pool, the grate at the end of the lane leaving imprints in my knees. It's boring, swimming, but it keeps me in shape for surfing and windsurfing.
This is how those months passed. Walking to and from work, freezing in the blowing snow. Driving to the gym, watching movies, downloading music. Searching internet dating sites for potential friends within two hours drive. Weekends spent gathering energy for next week's classes.
Now that the snow is gone, these dark memories lurk in the past. They encourage me to never again live through winter. I will find a way to avoid the cold, whatever it takes.
