"Anytime Fitness, Winter Heat, and the Things We Carry"

Peekskill’s evergreen, laid to rest beneath an overcast sky. It stood for joy — now it bows to time.

Joined a new gym and met a trainer named Angel — the kind of man who makes you forget why you walked in there in the first place. He’s got a romantic Spanish accent that rolls in warm and unhurried, big brown eyes that linger a second longer than expected, and biceps carved like they were meant to be admired. One session with him and suddenly the treadmill wasn’t the only thing raising my heart rate.

Maybe that’s why the cold feels sharper this week. Without snow, the nights have been colder, and inside the house the heat is warm enough but too humid, too heavy — the kind that makes you crack a window just to breathe. Too much heat makes me sluggish, irritable, restless.

But even that discomfort feels like a blessing when I think back to last year in that basement apartment on Decatur Avenue. No matter how high the thermostat was turned, it never got warm. The landlord complained if we opened the windows — “I’m paying for heat,” he’d say — as if that solved anything. His patchwork fixes did nothing, and eventually the rodents came. A nightmare. I almost got a cat, but after Newman, I realized I didn’t want another creature depending on me. A pet is like a child, and I don’t want a child. I only want to take care of myself — and maybe him, if he were here. I would take care of him because I love him.

I’ve tried to move on, but the truth is he’s the only one who remains constant. Everyone else feels temporary, passing through like weather. A man fulfills his needs when circumstances require it — so be it when there’s no commitment. It makes me wonder about myself. Am I polygamous, or have I simply not found anyone who stays?

He’s the only one I know who would stay and never go — the only one I’d want to stay and never leave. And yet he isn’t here, not physically. He’s 6,843 miles away, living in my heart instead of my home. But he’s with me always, a presence that doesn’t fade.

Life goes on in its small, ridiculous ways. Grocery shopping, for instance. Some of us are terrible at it — especially now that you have to bag your own items. This morning at C‑Town, the clerk started bagging for me, but a man behind me seemed in a rush, so I told her it was fine. That meant I wasn’t paying attention, and of course I left something behind: tofu. It’s probably long gone by now. In a place as busy as C‑Town, who remembers tofu?

On my way there, half awake but warmed by a message from Saleem — laughing at how cold I said I was last night — I saw workers removing the Peekskill Christmas tree. I stopped to take pictures. The sight made me unexpectedly sad. That tree spent years growing, only to be cut down, decorated, admired, and then dismantled, chopped, and recycled into mulch. It reminded me of Soylent Green — a strange association, but the mood fit. The whole scene felt as dreary as the overcast sky hanging over the city.
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And somehow all of it — Angel’s accent, the heat in the house, the memory of Newman, the man I love across the world, the forgotten tofu, the dismantled tree — belongs to the same day. The mind doesn’t move in straight lines. It loops, it leaps, it lingers. It remembers what it wants to remember.
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And today, this is where it wandered.