Stronger

Recently dumped by that dude, she’s been doing what she always does when things go bad, which is she tells me she wants to start all over and move to Arizona or California, and that I should totally come with, become her roommate, get a pug with her, make new friends, live off the fat of the land, and any other romanticized reveries of paradise she’s created while bawling in bar bathrooms. I tell her no, and I tell her there’s no chance of me visiting either because both of those states harbor teams that ousted the Cubs from the playoffs these last couple years. She’s been gulping fifths every night and drunk dialing her cable company, which is normal for her, but now she’s got this new thing where she’s picked up bodybuilding. Myself I’ve always referred to her as “an eyebrow-less Rachel McAdams,” but in all seriousness, she’s a good-looking girl. She has big gray eyes, an ironically cherubic face, and an ass that will.i.am would write songs about. And yet she’s going to throw that all away by becoming pretty much like a man. She says she does two-a-days now. She drinks Muscle Milk. She’s close to being able to put up a barbell with a plate on each side ten times, which is probably more than I can do at the moment. The other night she showed me her chiseled, twitching lats and traps. They’re disgusting. It’s disgusting. I don’t even need to ask her why she’s doing this, why lift weights. I already know. It’s so she can mask the pain, so she can stack pain on top of pain so that she feels pain no more. She’ll lift those weights and become so strong, damn it, so strong and so big so that she’ll never have to hurt again. She’ll show them all who’s who. Her ex will be so sorry. No one will ever mess with her again. No one will ever hurt her the way she’s been hurt. She’ll be so strong, the strongest that she has ever been, and when motherfuckers fuck with her, they will get fucked. When I show up to her Girl’s Night Out and she tells me all of this, I want to tell her that she’s being super immature, that if anything I’d rather see her destroy her body by getting fat than by getting ripped, but the timing isn’t right—everyone is having a good time at the club and the music is too loud and also I’m afraid that if I say anything bad to her face she’ll react by kicking my fucking ass is what she’ll do.