A Strange Fear

A Strange Fear

I walked in, and sat down in my usual spot: as close to Melissa as I possibly could. This isn’t as possessive as it may seem, because every time I got there before she did, she’d sit down as close to me as she possibly could.
“Ready?” she asked me as the instructor asked us if we were still sore from last time. Of course we were.
“No. Nobody’s ever ready for a slow and painful death,” I replied. She laughed.
“I wonder if I can get into a section of this class that isn’t taught by a ruthless Nazi…” she mused.
“Not possible, I’m afraid. Don’t forget, all gym teachers at all levels of education are ruthless Nazis.”
Another laugh. I don’t see myself as a very amusing person, but if you took it from her, it was like I was doing my one-man Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But there wasn’t much time for her to respond, because the workout began shortly thereafter. Time for my definition of pain to be changed in six or seven different ways. Lovely.
You see, I’m awful at this kind of stuff, on account of me being in such ludicrously bad shape. Part of this comes from my bad back (it’s a long story that I’d rather not get into), but part of it is simply because I eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Even back over the summer, when I had adopted a regular exercise regimen of going for a two-hour walk every night, I was accompanied by a bottle of Dr. Pepper and a Three Musketeers bar that I picked up at the local Rite-Aide. Yeah, it defeats the purpose, but hey. It also tastes good.
But yeah, I was bad at the class. My form was awful, I was clumsy, and I often physically couldn’t achieve what was being asked of me. But god dammit, I tried. You could tell by looking at me that I was putting my best effort into doing it right, and every day, I got a little closer. A little stronger, a little more flexible, a little better balanced, or whatever else it was I needed to properly finished the workout. My hope was that, one day, I’d be able to do an entire routine and only have to modify a few exercises, rather than stick in creative little variations the whole time, as I was doing now.
On the other hand, Melissa did it perfectly, gracefully moving from one hideously awkward-looking bodily contortion to the next as though this was just something people did on a regular basis. I envied her fluidity as she moved from corpse to tree to table. She was the only one out of us who looked like she had any experience with this at all: the rest of us just came off looking like we had been horribly mangled in a car wreck, but she… well, she did it right, somehow. Occasionally she would wear out and slip up, but it wasn’t nearly as often as the rest of us would, and she took the least time resting out of the whole class. In other words, she knew full well what she was doing, and probably could’ve taught the class herself if she was so inclined.
I knew she saw me struggling – after all, she looked over at me all the time, with what I was sure was a dreamy look in her brown eyes – but rather than laugh at my incompetence as people had in the past, she would help me, giving me little pieces of advice or words of encouragement. The instructor came by to chew me out during a particularly painful exercise when we were supposed to stick our legs up at a 180-degree angle and our lower back over our heads, thus bending us into a c-shape. That’s not something someone with back problems should be doing.
“Look at you,” he said. “Your form is terrible. You need to try harder.” And on and on and on
Melissa gave the instructor a scathing look while he was reading me the riot act, me not even bothering to give the sore back explanation that I had given and given and given when I couldn’t adequately do one of these impossible-seeming body-benders. I caught her eye and smiled as the guy walked away.
“Nazi,” she whispered, and we both laughed. I wondered if she’d be anywhere near as upset with him if he had given that same spiel to anyone else in the gym. She probably wouldn’t have even given it a second thought.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “I am gonna be so dead tomorrow…”
“Aw, don’t die. I’d miss you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Good.”
Well, our instructor may have been a raving sociopath, but it’s clear that enough cute little kids and adorable cartoon animals had pled him, with tears in their eyes, to have a heart. Or something. Yeah, not even I know where that came from. But he decided he’d cool things down.
“Now, I want you to lie on your backs. Meditate for a while. Clear your minds of everything, just focus on your breathing. I know I’ve been working you pretty hard, so, hey. Unwind for a couple of minutes.”
I know I was supposed to focus on my breathing, but my mind was on Melissa. As I had every day before I went to that class, I envisioned her planting a kiss on my lips out-of-the-blue, imagined myself shocked at first but enraptured immediately afterwards. In my mind’s eye, we were walking out of the place together, hand in hand, wanting nothing more than to be with one another. And I had this feeling that she was thinking the same thing about me. It could be wonderful, I knew. If I only told her how I felt, if I only worked up the courage, we’d have it. And I had a feeling that, if I asked, she’d accept me in a heartbeat. And, as our teacher called us to stop meditating and begin the cool down, I looked over at her, still in meditation, a smile on her face. Maybe I wasn’t the only one having these visions. My knees were weak as I got up to do the last bit of the totalitarian death workout, and while I’m sure it had something to do with my lack of muscles, I knew there was another explanation for it, too.
Well, that settled it. As we got up, the workout over, I committed myself to asking her.
“That was a bit easier than usual,” I said to her as we put our mats away. “Even with that fiasco in the middle.”
“Yeah. It helps that we had that bit of meditation. It really eased my mind.”
“Mine, too.”
We gathered our things and walked out of the gym.
“He’s still a sadist, though,” Melissa added.
“Like I said, gym teachers tend to be.”
“You’re right… Well, I’d best go now. Have a good weekend.”
“Wait, before you go…”
“Yeah?”
And then my courage just evacuated. Just like that. Something told me that she didn’t really feel that way, that she’d only reject me, and that it would all be for nothing. I knew the feeling all too well. It was the same emotion that had overtaken me every day since I came to the realization that maybe the two of us would be good together.
“Yes?” she asked. I tried to spur my confidence on, reminding myself of everything my friends had told me about how she was bound to say yes, but it didn’t work.
“Oh, wait, I’ve told you that story before. The one about when my friend and I watched all three original Star Wars movies in the same day while hopped up on chocolate and Slurpees. That was a good time.”
”That actually sounds like a good time. All right, have a good weekend!”
She had all but given me a second wind, and I should’ve invited her back to my place for the weekend so we could watch the original trilogy ourselves. It’s beyond me why I didn’t, but all I could do was say wish her a good weekend as well as she walked away.

Author's note: In interest of giving credit where credit is due, the title was inspired by the Smiths' "There is a Light That Never Goes Out."