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In Motion - UA Rec Center m4w


Date: 2010-08-01, 2:21PM CST


It is because you believe in movement without movement. It is because you want to move your legs up and down like pistons--no, not pistons, as that would conjure up images of machinery and mechanism and you are neither of these things: you are human, toned. You are not of the machine: you are its operator. You are the one who makes the sloping roller ramps beneath the pedal links slide back and forth like marbles down a chute of a game I played as a child, when exercise was part of existing, throwing my body into leaves, chasing my neighbor around the backyard because that was the game that we played, because that is what was expected of us. Our bodies stretch, grow old. We become layered--ourselves burying ourselves, creating ourselves. If they were to cut you open they would see that you have aged like a tree--circle within circles--circles being made by your legs, whatever inside of you transferring from foot to ankle to leg. You could be outside, running. You could be outside, running, passing trees and buildings that hold books, people. You are here because there are no variables: ahead of you a television telling you fictions--someone is dead, someone must be held accountable. Maybe you too like to look at the people below--men and women in business attire and then not. You too count the amount of towels that girl took. You too notice the rotating staff in red shirts looking skyward to find out baseball scores in between sweeping the ground that we are not walking on. I could tell you these things--I could point out the man on the step-machine who looks like an extra in a Cold War biopic. We could laugh at the men who look like wolves that circle the weight room below, the girls in the mirrors. Look, another tour of terrified teenagers and their parents on their way to the basketball courts: one will leer too long at the old men playing racquetball in their beat-up shoes and their long white socks and become separated. I saw two girls forget the game they were playing and start kissing in one of those courts once, the taller of the two pressing her summer love against the glass before resuming their game, bouncing the rubber ball off the floor, then off the wall. I would never ask you to do this--to constrain you in a box like that, despite your isolation on a stationary elliptical. I would never ask you any of these things, as I too am isolated--by a machine without wheels that warns me I am going too fast, that my heart cannot keep up. I am left to look at your back, your hair shaking like a pom-pom. I am left to wonder where it is you think you are going.
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