“I can’t do this,” I find myself saying aloud, the words painful. I look around the patio, wondering how loud I actually say it. No one turns to see. In fact, everyone at the coffee shop patio is neatly paired off into various groupings, and this realization punches me in the gut. I find solace in the fact that there is one man, alone, working diligently on his laptop, but my brain justifies his solitude as productivity, which more deeply categorizes my purposeless existence as straight-up loneliness. My stomach tenses.
I can’t face it and look away, staring at my fingers as they spin my cup around and around in random intervals.
What am I feeling? Why now?
And the thought trickles down my spine like drips from a warming icicle: I haven’t done any of these adventures with mysecret person. I’ve done all of them with Martin. The singing, the swinging, the thrifting. All with Martin.
Ever since I stole that dumb book, I haven’t been alone with my secret person. I’ve had Martin with me, either by coincidence or invitation, and I’ve loved every minute of it.
Except today.
Today was just me. And my secret person, of course, but only felt as an absence.
I sip my coffee as my mind grows numb from the weight.
I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this alone. This time the thought spirals through the patio around me. I can’t think straight and I’m being pummeled with a million questions: Do I even want to continue with my secret person? Can I change the game? How do I communicate with them? How much of this should I share with Martin? What kind of ungrateful person am I that I would respond this way to such a great gift?
I’m not even sure where to start. The spiral is so overwhelming, I focus on just finishing my coffee. Alone.
The afternoons at the gym are busy, so we’re fortunate enough to snag a flat bench for pressing. Usually I work out in the afternoons and Martin mostly goes early in the morning, and I meanearly. He’s a crack-of-dawn riser whereas I can’t make much sense of the world until I’ve had some caffeine and some daylight for a while. Today we’re working out together just because we’ve both been busy and figure it’s a good way to hang out.
“How’s your mom doing?” I ask in-between bench press sets. Martin can lift heavier than me, so we’re always loading and unloading the bar as we take turns spotting for each other. Today is chest and shoulders day.
“Better,” he says, huffing a weight plate off the bar, leaning it nearby because it will go right back on after my lift. “She’s almost feeling like herself again.”
“It was her heart?” I take my spot on the bench, aligning myself with the bar.
“Cardiac arrhythmia, they call it. She just mostly felt run-down, a little dizzy. Then she started experiencing a shortness of breath, but they’ve looked her over, gave her something, and she’s back at home.”
“Glad to hear,” I say. I watch as his eyes seem to focus on some distant place, well beyond anything in the gym.
Martin has always been close with his family. His mom and dad live in town and he keeps in contact with his brother and sister even with their families and all. I’m always hearing stories about his nephews, who are toddlers.
“Me too,” he says distantly. “Dad is really worried, like something more might be up. Hope not. Sometimes he has a sixth sense about things.”
I finish my set, rack the bar with Martin’s help.
“Hope she’s okay,” I say.
We retreat to our places on each side of the bar to reload for Martin’s set. The benches on either side of us are being used, so we try to stay clear of the other moving parts of the gym. Martin takes his turn, lifting and heaving, stretched out on the bench.
This process repeats itself for several sets, and we snag an incline bench just as another pair are wiping it down and gathering their things.
We begin loading the bar.
“So what’s the latest with your secret person?” he asks, slamming the plate flush.
I freeze for a moment, looking at the floor. I feel the ghost of a coffee cup in my hand, the vapor of loneliness rises in my chest, mixing with the shadow of joy I feel about the possibilitythat my secret person bought me a coffee, maybe. My chest tightens and I look at Martin, who is casually waiting for my response.
My brain tries to assemble the words to explain all this to him, but I hear myself saying instead, “Coffee.”
The clinking sound of weight plates echo around us for a moment.
“We bought coffee for each other, I think.” Martin looks at me like he knows something. There’s a twinkle in his eye I can’t identify. Can he read my thoughts? “We spent the day buying coffee for the person behind us in line at coffee shops. Sort of a pay-it-forward day to see how many chains of kindness we could start. It was fun.”
How can I possibly explain to him that I wished he was there? That this was the first time my secret person and I were actually together-separately alone? Instead, I take my place on the bench, searching the bar with my thumbs for the best grip angle, and maybe other answers, too. On an incline press you sit at, well, an incline, so it’s easier to have a conversation which somehow helps me focus on the details. “I tried to buy a coffee at Harold’s, you know, in Bricktown, and my coffee was already paid for.”
He looks at me, smiling.
