2. It Was Only Three Months! #2
I leaned back slightly.
“So what,” I said. “I’m emotionally addicted?”
Mel smirked.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re human.”
I snorted and shook my head. “Did the gym start offering emotional seminars between squats?”
Mel rolled her eyes, grabbed her water bottle, and stood up.
“Podcasts,” she said.
“You gave me advice from a podcast?” I asked.
“Yup!”
“It’s like the modern way of saying you got your sources from Wikipedia!”
“Also therapy,” she added.
“You go to therapy?”
“Yes, James,” she said flatly, taking a drink from her water bottle. “Some of us believe in preventive maintenance.”
I pointed at her. “That sounded suspiciously like something a life coach would say.”
She shrugged. “You hang around enough emotionally unstable people, you start doing research.”
“What the f—” I said, my jaw dropping.
“You basically started this conversation with ‘it was only three months.’”
I sighed. “That’s a very reasonable sentence.”
“That’s a very rehearsed sentence,” she corrected.
I opened my mouth to argue again, then stopped.
Annoyingly, she was right.
“Come on.” She nudged me. “Another set.”
I groaned. “You’re using my heartbreak as a workout plan at this point.”
“No,” she said, picking up her weights. “I’m using your heartbreak as proof that your heart actually works.”
She glanced back at me with a small smile.
I smiled back at her—heart touched.
I picked up the dumbbells, and apparently, we were training both muscles and emotions today.
One rep.
Two.
My arms burned, but not as much as they had earlier.
Mel moved to the squat rack behind me, already loading plates like conversation we’d just had was simply another part of the workout.
Perhaps to her, it was.
Her words sat somewhere in my chest, like truth waiting patiently for me to stop arguing with it.
The smoothie bar sat just outside the gym’s glass doors.
Mel ordered first.
“Protein smoothie,” she said to the bored-looking guy behind the counter. “Chocolate. And please don’t drown it in almond milk like the last time.”
The guy nodded like someone who had absolutely drowned it in almond milk last time.
I leaned against the counter. “Strawberry banana. The emotionally fragile option.”
Mel snorted.
We stepped aside while our drinks were being made, the low whirr of the blender filling the space between us.
“So.” Mel glanced at me. “How are you feeling now?”
We were not done with the conversation.
I shrugged. “Lighter.”
“Good.”
“But not cured.”
Mel laughed. “James, what you’re feeling isn’t a cold.”
“I know. But it’s weird. I get it now. Logically. What you said earlier.”
She nodded. “Trauma lives in the body, you know. Not just in our minds.”
“From which podcast is that?” I asked, almost laughing.
“No, this one’s from therapy,” she said, shaking her head. “Think about it. When you were talking about Victor earlier, what happened?”
I thought of it for a second.
“I got tense?”
“Exactly. Your shoulders came up. Your breathing got shallow.”
I hadn’t even noticed.
“Your body locked up like you were bracing for something,” she continued. “That’s not logic, James. That’s muscle memory.”
The guy behind the counter slid our smoothies toward us.
Mel handed me mine.
“So do I just keep working out to forget him?” I asked.
“Move,” she corrected. “Run. Lift. Dance. Scream into a pillow. Whatever.”
“That’s your medical advice?”
“Quite literally.” She took a sip of her smoothie. “You process feelings with your mind, but you release them with your body.”
I frowned slightly.
“The point is,” she said, tapping my shoulder, “your body has to let it out somehow.”
I took a sip. The drink tasted sweeter than I expected.
“That’s why people say they feel better after a workout,” she continued. “They’re not just burning calories. They’re shaking loose feelings. It’s all chemical.”
I leaned back against the counter, considering that.
Three months of late-night calls.
Three months of waiting for his texts.
Three months of believing someone meant the things they said.
Maybe that didn’t just live in my head. Maybe it lived somewhere else too. In my chest. In my shoulders. In the way I still braced myself whenever his name crossed my mind.
Mel nudged my arm. “Congratulations. You survived your first heartbreak workout.”
I smiled faintly.
“I’ve missed you, you know,” she said, her eyes filled with longing. “We’ve all missed you.”
I swallowed hard.
Because nobody tells you that disappearing hurts the people who stay.
“I know,” I said quietly. “I missed you too… all of you.”
“Don’t ever do that again please,” she said. “Going MIA without any of us knowing where you were or what’s happening with you.”
Guilt crept up on me.
“I’ll be more careful with who I fall in love with next time,” I just said.
“And James,” she added. “Whatever happens, don’t ever fall in love with the past anymore, okay?”
This got me wondering.
I looked at her with curious eyes.
Worry marred her expression, laced with a little shame or guilt that I could not figure out why.
Perhaps, I was too heartbroken that I could not even decode correct emotions anymore.
Well, if you had been scarred for too long, would you even have the correct mental and emotional state at all?
“Okay…” I just replied.
Mel shook her head to ease the quiet tension and raised her cup. “To emotional cardio.”
I clinked mine against it.
“To recovery,” I said, not believing a word of it.
It was only three months.
True.
Which sounded reasonable until I remembered I had spent those three months thinking he might be my forever.