Sensitive Young Man in The Gym

The gym is a zoo. Torture for a sensitive young man like me

Every day after work I go to the gym. I have a fabulous body. I’m not huge but I am tall and lean and have lifted enough in my short life so that I look reasonably presentable, which is all I can manage to think about while I’m there. 

The M/F ratio in here is like 80/20. Maybe even 90/10. But the girls who do show are just glowing. That is how my brain perceives them.

I step out of the locker room into a huge building with maybe a hundred people, and the five or six young women with ponytails and yoga pants light up and my eyes go right there, for a second, until I realize I’m doing it, and then I move forward to do what I came to do. 

but lately I realize that exercise is not what I came here to do.

I came in to see these girls. To be near them. To appreciate my own luscious body in the mirror, in between sets, peacefully coexisting with a perfectly fuck-able bespectacled dyed hair tight little fat-ass asian girl just a few feet to my right, close enough to smell my worn shirt.

I’m looking at her too many times. Staring straight ahead at myself but enjoying her image in my periphery. Imagining our bodies intertwined.

Saying nothing to her or to anyone, ever. Stretching my shoulders back to counteract a long day of being hunched forward. Wishing to be so close to her a few hundred years ago instead. When it wasn’t a crime to just act natural. 

They’re wearing makeup. They put on makeup before going to the gym. ALL OF THEM. They wear bright pink spandex leggings. How the fuck is anyone in here thinking of anything else? 

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Change clothes. Pool, hot tub, sauna. Mostly inhabited by old misshapen wrinkly fat boomer men. Every day, all the time. They love the sauna. I look even better shirtless.

Each time I step into the 24 Hour Fitness Pool-Sauna area, I’m hoping, stupidly, that today is the day no one else uses the facility besides me and, miraculously, an eager sexy shapely 20-year old asian girl.

That she happens to be super-ovulating or just got dumped or something so my brilliant aura compels her to orbit me and strike up a conversation.

That it just falls into my lap. That we like the same kind of music or something. That somehow my game is sufficient to break the touch barrier in minutes. That she gets a sick thrill making me hard in public. That her breasts are soft. That we fuck in the sauna. That we almost get caught. That we never see each other again.

Here is reality: I swim a few laps, sit in the hot tub for 5-10 minutes avoiding eye contact with other men, spend a few minutes suffering alone in the wet sauna and then join an eclectic mix of strangers anxiously sitting in the dry sauna, staring straight ahead. 

There are sometimes decent looking girls in the dry sauna. But we don’t see each other. We don’t talk. I’m dripping wet, I think people are kind of offended by my presence. I sit with my elbows on my knees, like it’s half time.

Usually the anxiety of sitting silently in such a small room so close to so many other people is what drives me out. My heart pounds like mad. I hate that I get anxious in there. It’s just mental weakness. Those fat idiot boomers walk in here say good evening ladies and tell a joke. I seethe in neurotic frustration.

I should invest in a home gym…