Gym

I caught myself in the middle of a lie yesterday as I stretched at the gym, a top knot on my head tied in a heap with strands of my own unwashed hair. The clarity with which I saw myself was so startling, and a wave of realisation washed over me so quickly that I stood there still, feeling foolish. A nakedness I had forgotten I had felt before.
I realised all of a sudden that I was trying to convince the girl by my side of something. The girl paying no attention to me, who hadn't noticed I was even there, mid work out and sweaty, headphones blasting music I couldn't hear. In that moment, as the sun had begun to disappear into the sea outside, more than anything else, I wanted her to believe I was a ballet dancer.
I was stretching stretches from a life long ago when I was a tiny somebody else trying to be somebody bigger than I was, pointing my toes and arching my back, small arabesques, fifth position.
How desperate I was for her to imagine me on the stage, dancing Romeo and Juliet; masculine and soft, a Rudolf Nureyev type with arms that women felt safe in; arms that could lift them up towards heaven, arms that said I was guiding us to a magnificence so shiny and astounding in its newness.
I wanted her to think I was somebody else and let myself get lost in the identity I had created, her still none the wiser; everybody has to be somewhere. And so I continued until the lie grew so whole, so complete I barely recognised myself inside of it.
And then, with an urgency that scared me, I wanted to run to her and put my hands on her shoulders and make it clear, make it crystal clear, that I probably wouldn't always be lost. That I wouldn't spend forever sifting through the leftovers of lives that never were, that I wouldn't live inside the dreams that hadn't been weaved into the reality of my actual life, that it wouldn't always be an endless list of tasks that I'm better than or worse than or so deep in the middle of that I forget that I am still able to take my days in my hands and mould them into something else.
That I wouldn't always be that guy at the gym, imagining himself somewhere other than there.
That I would one day be enough.