I quit my job at Blink Fitness about three weeks ago. My fianc\u00e9 still doesn\u2019t know. He doesn\u2019t know because I wake up every morning in bed next to him, put on my purple Blink Fitness shorts and yellow Blink Fitness shirt\u00a0and pretend I\u2019m going to work. He doesn\u2019t wake up in spite of the noise I make getting ready. In spite of the relentless clamor of the Upper East Side out our window, this new city we moved to for his schooling, this city I moved to, across country, for him. He doesn\u2019t know I\u2019m keeping a secret. He doesn\u2019t know I know one of his.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow was your day?\u201d he asks hours later, when I\u2019m home.<\/p>\n
\u201cFine,\u201d I shrug. \u201cNothing new.\u201d<\/p>\n
To keep the act up, I recycle something that happened at work months ago and tell it as if it just happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis lady came into the gym today. She couldn\u2019t find Bravo on the TV\u2019s by the treadmills so I had to spend about twenty minutes finding it for her. She couldn\u2019t work out until she found just the right \u2018Housewives.\u2019 I hate people like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMe too,\u201d says my fianc\u00e9, glancing up from a textbook. His brain\u2019s swallowed whole by his PhD studies, so he\u2019s not really sorry when he murmurs, \u201cSorry you had a bad day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Except I didn\u2019t have a bad day. I spent the day wandering through Barnes and Noble. Like I\u2019ve done every day since I quit. I walked the fifty-five screeching, sweltering blocks from our tiny studio apartment to the bookstore. I grabbed a book from Sci-Fi and took a seat in Self-Help. I read for six hours. I bought tea and a donut. My day was just fine.<\/p>\n
The next day I\u2019m hunkered down in Fantasy. I now have less than $200 to my name, and because of the cost of my donut and tea I have less and less every day. Until I quit the gym, I was a 44-year-old man making $9 an hour wiping sweat off of benches. My fianc\u00e9\u2019s found his career and a community. I\u2019ve found minimum wage in a city I hate. I glance up from the book I\u2019m reading to the books on the shelves. I think of the children\u2019s book I wrote at 19. The book that was supposed to make me a writer, that was supposed to start my career. I frown at the cramp in my ankles, getting up. I spend the rest of the day upright in Automotive.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow was your day?\u201d my fianc\u00e9 asks. Tonight, his entire cohort is over. They crowd every space in our studio, and our walls reverberate with chatter.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay,\u201d I say. \u201cExcept for this jerk on the elliptical\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
But my fianc\u00e9’s already lost in his cohort. And that\u2019s fine. I\u2019ll just save that lie for tomorrow. I stare at the textbooks spread all around them, and I think back to when I\u2019d walked in from a grueling Blink Fitness night shift a few weeks before, when I was still actually working at Blink Fitness, and how I\u2019d moved one of his textbooks off the counter. I remember how it was stuffed full of papers. Forgotten letters from other schools he\u2019d applied to.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhich grad schools did you get into again?\u201d I\u2019d asked him later that night.<\/p>\n
My fianc\u00e9 didn\u2019t flinch when he said, \u201cOnly this one. All the others turned me down.\u201d<\/p>\n
That night, I\u2019d laid sleeplessly beside him. I thought of the wonderfully rain-splashed city I\u2019d left, of its wide, easy sidewalks and all of my friends who still walked them. The next morning I put on my Blink Fitness shorts and Blink Fitness shirt and walked out the door. I walked to the gym and then walked all the way past it. Forty-five minutes later I\u2019d felt my phone buzz. I didn\u2019t need to look to know it was my boss. It was easier to just turn my phone off, nestle myself in a corner, and keep reading.<\/p>\n
Three weeks after that and I\u2019m coming up with another gym story to recycle. I walk into our studio finding, not my fianc\u00e9, but a note written on the back of a Con-Ed envelope. He\u2019s gone out for the evening. He tells me he\u2019s not sure when he\u2019ll be home. He signs his name. Below that, a reminder. He needs my half of the rent\u2014$1200.<\/p>\n
I think of my less than $200. From that, I subtract my half of the rent. And from that, I subtract the cost of my misery, of the sense my times about to run out, that everything I was supposed to become is slipping away. Every subtraction pushes me further into the negative, deeper into a spiraling surplus of regret.<\/p>\n
I read his note over and over, scribbled on the back of a power bill.<\/p>\n
Our apartment is scattered with textbooks.<\/p>\n
One of those books is stuffed full of papers.<\/p>\n
One of those papers is a letter\u2014an acceptance from Oregon State University. One of the schools my fianc\u00e9 said he didn\u2019t get into but did. I want to rip the letter loose from that textbook, turn it over, and write him a note of my own.<\/p>\n
You said every other school said \u201cno\u201d to you. You said we had to move to the only school that said yes. We could\u2019ve stayed put. We could have stayed home. I gave up everything I knew for you for $9 an hour. Take my fucking rent out of that.<\/p>\n
Outside, the Upper East Side is a showdown of boomboxes. The noise will keep me from falling asleep, but when my fianc\u00e9 comes home I\u2019ll pretend to be. He\u2019ll get into bed next to me. Close, but not so close he might touch me. I\u2019ll move left just a little, he\u2019ll move right just a little, drifting further and further away from each other, until there\u2019s a space so wide in between us it\u2019s as if we\u2019re on opposite ends of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think of my less than $200. From that, I subtract my half of the rent. And from that, I subtract the cost of my misery, of the sense my times about to run out, that everything I was supposed to become is slipping away. Every subtraction pushes me further into the negative, deeper into a spiraling surplus of regret.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":20167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[760],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfiction","writer-will-mcmillan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19982"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20166,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982\/revisions\/20166"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}