The Guy with the Blue Towel

The thing about social anxiety that people who don't have it never quite get is that it's not shyness. Shy people want to talk and feel awkward. I want to talk and feel like I'm about to be found out. For what, I couldn't tell you. That's the trick of it. There's no crime. There's just the certainty of being caught. So, the gym. Fourteen months. Same time, 6am, before it fills up. Same rack, second from the left. Same headphones, playing nothing half the time, just in to make the sign that says do not talk to me. I know the regulars by their towels. There's a woman with a pink one who does the same forty-minute circuit like a Swiss clock. There's an older guy, very tall, with a grey one, who only does legs. And there's the guy with the blue towel, roughly my age, thirty-three or so, who has been at the rack next to mine three mornings a week for almost the entire fourteen months and who I have never once looked in the eye. We nod. That's what we have. A nod at 6:03 and a nod at 6:50. It's the most sustained relationship I've had with a stranger in my life and I've been oddly protective of it. Last Thursday he wasn't there. That shouldn't have mattered. People miss a day. But he wasn't there Thursday and he wasn't there Saturday and by Monday I'd invented four separate disasters for him and was standing at my rack feeling something I eventually identified as worry, for a man whose name I did not know. Monday he came in at 6:10. Late for him. He had his arm in a sling. Here is what happened in my head in the four seconds after I saw the sling. Say something. Don't say something. It's none of your business. It's obviously your business, you've been worried for three days. You'll say it wrong. He'll think you're weird. You've nodded at him for fourteen months, he already thinks you're weird. What if he just wants to be left alone. What if he's been waiting fourteen months for someone to not leave him alone.

That last one got me. Because it was mine, and I'd never once turned it around. I took a headphone out. One. Which is a bigger deal than it sounds. "Hey. What happened?" He looked surprised. Not unpleasantly. Just surprised, like the rack had spoken. "Shoulder. Fell off my bike. Stupid." "That's rough. How long are you out?" "Six weeks for the arm. I can still do legs, so." He gestured at the leg press with his good hand. "Might have to become that guy." "The grey towel guy." "Yeah." He laughed. "You clocked him too." "Fourteen months. I've clocked everyone." "Fourteen months," he said. "That's about when I started. I figured you were a lifer." "No. Just consistent. And, honestly, not great at the talking part." He nodded like that was a normal thing to say, which I suppose it is, and said, "I'm Sam," and I said, "Ravi," and that was it. Six sentences, maybe seven. He went to the leg press. I put the headphone back in. But something had come loose. On Wednesday he said, "Ravi, you got a second, can you spot me on the one arm thing," and I did, and on Friday the pink towel woman said "morning" to both of us on the way past, and I said "morning" back, out loud, at 6:04am, in a gym, to a person. I know how small this is. I know that most people do this before breakfast without thinking about it. But I'm thirty-three and I've been carrying this thing since I was a kid and the version of me who took a headphone out on Monday is not someone I've met before. I like him. I'd like to see more of him. I think that's allowed.