Breaking Up is Hard to Do

It had been at LEAST two years since I've walked through the doors and into this small fitness club.  Like Proust and his spoonful of tea and Madeleine crumbs, a flood of memories hit me the moment I opened the door.  The smell was unchanged, not a nasty gym smell, just a unique, indescribable smell that flooded my senses and my brain with images and memories.  I opened the gym membership in 2006, six months before my husband was to come home from an 18 month deployment.  My sister had encouraged me, ok, pushed me to join so I would feel good about myself when he came home.   Two years later he and I were empty nesters and so began going to the gym together!  Elliptical side by side, treadmill, trying some free weights with his coaching.  We would end each session seeing who could do the most of three sets of 10 or more on the Roman chair.  One late November in the dim hours of dawn, we spotted a fox on the hill across the road, running zig-zag through the tall dead grass.  Life became incredibly busier, empty nest filled up, another deployment, a new job with a much longer commute, gas prices soared, and there just seems to be no time for this.  The membership has been sitting idle though faithfully paid for two years so I finally dragged myself to the parking lot and through the doors . . . and broke up.