The Gym, Late Afternoon
The gym is bright in the wrong way. Fluorescent light. Mirrors everywhere. Bodies doing what bodies have always done. Pushing. Pulling. Sweating. You would expect something human to happen. It never does.
People arrive sealed. Headphones in. Eyes straight ahead. Everyone pretending not to look while looking constantly. Desire hangs in the air like stale perfume. Nobody touches it.
Once, when people trained their bodies, it happened inside life. In ancient Greece, physical training took place in public spaces where thinking, arguing, competing, and attraction existed together. Philosophers taught nearby not as a curiosity, but because the body and the mind were not separate projects. If you showed strength, people noticed. If you stood out, something might follow. That was understood. That was the risk.
Later, bodies were shaped by work, travel, danger, long days, short nights. You did not “work on yourself.” You lived, and your body recorded it. Attraction followed competence. Endurance. Presence. There was no protected zone where effort had no consequence.
Even in more polite centuries, training stayed social. Rowing clubs. Fencing halls. Dance floors. People watched each other. Rivalries formed. So did alliances. Sometimes more. Nobody needed rules posted on the wall.
The modern gym breaks that continuity cleanly.
Here, bodies are displayed, but interaction is forbidden. You can look, but not linger. You can admire, but not acknowledge. You can improve yourself, but only in isolation. Attraction is allowed only as an internal issue, never as a shared event.
Maximum visibility. Minimum risk.
Men lift under constant comparison. Women move under constant defence. Everyone senses it. Nobody names it. The mirrors register everything. The people pretend not to.
This arrangement is not accidental. It belongs to a civilisation that wants disciplined, attractive, self-optimising individuals, but does not trust them with ambiguity. Desire is dangerous. Misunderstanding is dangerous. Rejection is dangerous. So the risks are neutralised.
The gym offers a compromise. You can sculpt your body without ever having to deal with another person in a real way. You leave stronger, leaner, technically improved. Nothing follows you home except soreness and silence.
That is why the place feels exhausting even on light days. The tension never resolves. Signals go out and return unanswered. Effort accumulates. Meaning does not. You walk out physically spent and socially untouched, which is not how humans evolved to feel.
Some people sense this and drift away. They train at home. They walk uphill. They row. They run outside where weather interferes. Where space is real. Where movement belongs to life again instead of a showroom.
The gym is not evil. It is worse than that. It is polite. Efficient. Carefully empty.
It shows you what this civilisation believes it can manage:
bodies without consequence
strength without contact
attraction without encounter
So we lift.
We avoid.
We go home.
And everyone acts as if nothing strange is happening.