Me: "I think I'm gonna need a fourth day at two sets."

Laura: "Second set giving you issues?"

Me: "Yeah, on a few exercises. I can do the first set of the bicep curls with no problem, but I usually have to stop somewhere around the sixth rep of the second set. Only way I can finish it out is to stop between each rep to take a breath. Is it going to be better to drop down in weight or to add in another day or two for me to really adjust to this weight?"

Fifteen hundred is my magic number, and the notebook on my left is giving me hints that I've got about a fifty-fifty chance of meeting it on a daily basis.

I won't lie to you; this is my own personal hell. There's a reason I've avoided this process for most of my adult life, because I was fully aware of what it would do to me. I am twenty-seven. If you count the eight years in which my eating disorder was most active, and the six years that have since passed, I have spent more than half my life learning how to evade the demon I chose to allow into my life.
I'm trying to learn how to look it in the face, because if I can look, I can learn to stare. If I can stare, I can learn to talk back. If I can learn to talk back, I can learn to swear back, and maybe, if I can stare and swear and kick, maybe I'll have a chance of finding out what it's like not to live with this on a daily basis.

"When I said 'get your heart rate down,' I meant it, and now. Don't make me haul you off this machine and beat you." - Laura-the-trainer

In the week I've been working out, I've learned about as much about Laura-the-trainer as she has learned about me. Although I cannot definitively say what her waist size is (knowledge that she has about me), I can say one thing for her: she appreciates mornings almost as much as I do.

Which is to say, not at all.If I come in for an early workout, our exchanges are often more grunted than spoken. But she's there, and I'm there, and that's apparently what counts. However, when awake, she is fearsome.

I'd just finished curling my biceps into entertaining little squiggles and moved on to the triceps machine when Laura materialized to my left. She was grinning, in that particular I-have-an-evil-secret way that I've learned to recognize after less than a week.

"You'll never believe what I did last night."

There is one last Colorado story I plan to tell, and it's one that I've been holding close and quiet, because the time wasn't right to tell it. That is no longer the case.

In this life, at least, like attracts like. I won't say that most, or half, or even many of my friends have an extraordinary event in their past that affects their adult lives, but some of them do. For those who do, though, the friendship is subtly different; a different level of protection and guardianship than what is found among those who don't understand.Sometimes, you don't even have to know what the event was to recognize the effects. Our hobo language of survival isn't always visible to the rest of the world, but once you learn it, you know what to look for. The presence - or absence - of particular words. The inability to joke about a particular subject. A subtly self-destructive pattern of behavior.

I knew things were a bit more serious than my original reckoning when I realized that over half of the skin of my bottom lip had come off in a single piece. Stupid, stupid girl; what in the previous twenty-four hours had failed to convince me that I'd had a major lapse in self-control? Did the insomnia and the twenty-four hours of shakes not serve as warning enough?

Stupid, stupid girl.

Day two of caffeine withdrawal. On the phone last night, in the middle of something that smelled halfway between chastisement and argument, I admitted to the voice on the other end of the phone that I should probably start treating caffeine with the same wary respect that most people give to alcohol.

"The house was different without you here. At night, the only sounds were the sounds of the house settling. It was kinda spooky."

"Got used to my late-night noises, hmm?"

"Yeah. A bit of music, and the taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap of keys. Wasn't quite the same without them."

- Jeff