Imagination Land

I would not be lying to you if I told you that I've been working out very regularly for little more than a month now. I actually enrolled at the gym way back in August of the previous year, which amounts to a mere 15% utilization of resources and I couldn't let the gym folks have the pleasure of ripping me off. Besides, I badly needed to increase my stamina - which I found out, during a recent hike, had considerably waned over the past six months, owing to the sedentary lifestyle I had involuntarily chosen to lead. Anyway, those were incentives enough to transport my lazy ass onto a treadmill.
So there I was running on a treadmill, my eyes inconspicuously looking around for some eye candy to distract my mind off pressing the stop button. And let me tell you - that is no easy task, especially when one is so used to rationalizing everything. Thoughts like "Come On, five more minutes of running.", would inevitably be followed by a string of replies like these -
"Big difference. Perhaps I would do better to avoid the next time I feel like having a pizza."
"Then five more minutes would be a bonus."
"But if I do run for five more minutes, I'd probably give in to the temptation and gobble down a cheese-burst without so much as a hint of regret."
"Or maybe I won't. Let me try to emulate the state of my mind before consenting to have pizza for dinner."
...

Before I would act on these "rationalizing" thoughts, my only hope was that those five minutes would lapse.
This would happen everyday, and during the 20-25 minutes of running, the battle of reason vs. excuses would be fought everyday with new weapons and strategies in the battlefield of my mind just to keep my feet on the treadmill and my hands off the stop button.

But all this changed one fine evening, when a very pretty female walked into the gym. She was perfect and my eyes lingered on her for a second too long. She definitely noticed me staring, but before she could react I forced myself to look at the TV which was showing a really dull cricket match. I didn't dare look at her directly again, nor did I try to surreptitiously look through the mirrors, which were put up all over the place, hoping to get a glance at that beautiful face which had instantly captivated me. I was once caught in an elevator, in the same act, and at the cost of a minutes' embarrassment, learnt a lesson that light reflects both ways off a mirror. So, I glanced around everywhere, except in her general direction, following the eyes of iron-pumping macho guys to see if they too were trying to steal a look at her. But no. Most seemed to be interested in two other females, one of whom wore tracks which said "Juicy" on the ass. No one seemed to be interested in THE girl. She was mine and mine alone and a small voice inside me went an overjoyed "Yay!".
Thus the story began.
As days went by, I noticed that I actually started looking forward to going to gym everyday at 7.45 pm - which is when she came. And what's more? She lives in the same apartment as I do, although in a different block. That bit of information was easy to find out given that I ensured our gym timings overlapped.
The set of excuses I had to deal with everyday before going to the gym simply vanished and the ones which would pop up while running on the treadmill could be consoled with little effort. That was a strange feeling, because I always had to resort to employing extremely convoluted loops of self-referencing arguments to confuse the part of my mind which made excuses. And now the following argument "If you run for five more minutes, maybe there is the tiniest possibility that she'll notice you." would power me for ten extra minutes. A disturbing realization of how powerful emotional responses can be in a person who sees rationality as the highest ideal. I knew she was way out of my league. If I were a 3 she was a 9. Yet, I continued to happily and successfully fool myself that there was just that tiniest of chances. The rational side of my brain wasn't completely disappointed - the "excuse making" side was much easier to fool now than ever before. Although there was always that uneasy feeling of harbouring a foreign visitor who could one day turn against you.
Nevertheless, I welcomed the seemingly innocuous and certainly beneficial musing into my formerly rational and safeguarded mind. And I discovered a thing or two about it. The more I let my myself get carried away by it, the easier it became in the gym. The "excuse making" part of my brain didn't demand deeply reasoned and carefully crafter counter-arguments, like it used to - it was content with the expectation of seeing the girl in the gym. In fact, I was able to improve my workout routine just based on her. The deal I made with myself was that normally I would run for 3kms, but if she showed up I would run for 4kms. And it actually worked! I admired and appreciated this new found power I had for self-discipline but I also feared it.
And so it went on for a couple of weeks when I decided that I had to talk to her. I spent the next week flooding my mind with all kinds of strategies of approach - from funny ones like getting a slab of ice, breaking it in front of her and then saying "Now that the ice is broken..." to horrendous ones like maliciously using Stockholm syndrome to my advantage! But obviously I could come up with nothing sensible and reassuring, and so I posed this conundrum, over lunch to three of my friends. They seemed to be sympathetic, but one of them did put forth an alarming idea which could have had disastrous results. "What if you walk up to her and, <quiet> <quiet> <quiet> <quiet> BOOBS! ". Damn, it becomes even harder to stifle that thought just because he mentioned it. If you've seen "The Melty Man Cometh" episode in  Coupling, you know exactly what I mean. Anyway, the consensus was that I should walk up to her ( from the front, not the back ), and ask her if she lived in the same apartment building as me and I was promised that no sexual harrassment cases would be filed if I stuck to just that.
Well, today was the day I braced myself for the encounter. It was Friday, a holiday on the occasion of Good Friday, and I had noticed that she came a tad early on holidays. So I went in at 7 pm. She walked in at 7.30. I was done by 8.15 pm, but hung around pretending to be busy - not that she noticed anyway. I waited until she left for the ladies dressing room - which was adjacent to men's. After a few awkward minutes at the water cooler, from where I could see if she exited, gulping down liters of water ( without realizing that no one was watching ), I followed her to her bike, went a little ahead of her, turned around and
"Hey, don't you live in Roystonea? I think I've seen you around."
She replied in an unusually high pitched voice "Ya, I've seen you too. ", while she was looking for her keys.
For the first time, I was looking at her face clearly, and Damn! She was old. Would be atleast 10 years older than me. All the beauty that wasn't, simply melted away when she uttered those words in her squeaky tone. But I suppressed my shock, and tried to carry on,
"It is impressive how you manage to come here so regularily".
"What, what do you mean?"
"No, I am just saying that it isn't easy sticking to a routine. Is it?", I fumbled slightly surprised to hear that.
"Gym is a part of my routine and I follow it. OK.", she said dismissively.
I simply gave up and left. Perhaps I should have added a "Nice talking to you." at the end, but what the hell - she had ruined it all. She had killed the foreign visitor anthropomorphically speaking. And I am back to reality where there are no magical sentences I can employ anymore.

It would have been better to keep my mouth shut, and let the dream live on...
"But then I'd always be dreaming and never meet a real woman."
"Wouldn't that be all right? No real woman would come close to my imaginary one. Who was more useful in the end?"
"But, now that I know that the real one sucks, how could the imagination live on...?"
"Then I'll have to find a new stronghold, but I shouldn't be looking for it, lest I may not be able to fool my imagination."
"And Until then I'll have to continue looping through thoughts like these..."
...