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| by Melanie Griffin |
NOBODY TALKS ABOUT HOW much waiting
there is in heavy lifting.
All of the weightlifting manuals and websites and trainers
are fanatic about sleep, urging amounts that push into decadence for those with
other shit to do. And they each have their own scientifically calculated
opinions about the perfect rest intervals between sets, of course.
But that’s all usually just an excuse to transition to the
next move. Nobody tells you how much downtime you’ll have at the gym, between
bursts of energy that really feel too short to be supposedly doing you so much
good.
My boyfriend convinced me to start lifting, and after we
went through my first squat reps together, he put three minutes on his phone
and started to space out.
“So … we just stand here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “You can sit, if you want.” He
demonstrated on the small, shin-high stool that stayed next to the rack and
matched its upholstery to the floor mats.
I nodded as I had for the past twenty minutes after each of
his instructions. Inwardly, I panicked. I had left my headphones at home so we
could talk through all the new stuff I was learning. But nobody told me about
the dead time.
*
Dead time is my greatest dread. It feeds my anxiety like an
all-you-can-worry buffet, and when my brain is not focused on a task or
interacting with something external, it gets terrifyingly close to eating
itself.
This comes from early and deep inside my childhood. I did
most of my growing up before social media, without a TV in my room or a
computer the whole family didn’t share. Up until high school, our internet
hogged the landline, and my mom knew every single time I connected because I
had to crawl under the kitchen table to plug in.
I don’t have any siblings, either. Only children own
neither silence nor loneliness, but I think we may be acquainted with both a
little more than most.
None of this made me so afraid of dead time, though. My dad
did that.
*
My dad does not
look especially intimidating. He brushes six feet tall, flirts with 200 pounds
of weight when he’s off one of his intermittent fasting kicks. His eyes are the
same myoptic light blue as mine, and his jokes can get a whole room of folks
laughing. Among my parents’ friends, he’s got a well-earned reputation of being
charming and helpful.
But I know him best by his silences.
They are thunderous and all-consuming, and I’ve never
stopped trying to predict what will bring them on even though I have over
thirty years of proof that doesn’t work. Whatever thin logic I think I’ve
wrestled out of one is pinned down in defeat by what instigates the next.
At some point I learned it was best to play dead. Any other
response was a dare to give him a reason to lash out at whatever subject I
brought up. My mom has never stopped urging me to go ask him something to break
it up, but it’s so much easier to disappoint her than to stoke his wrath. It
was uncomfortable. But uncomfortable I could mostly push past with a book in my
room.
One other thing usually had somewhat of a chance of
thinning out Dad’s bad moods. It wasn’t a certainty, because nothing was—or
is—around him. But sometimes, music can help.
The music of Dad’s youth, specifically. The rock wizards he
got to see in concert for like a quarter in the early ‘70s when they were
un-famous enough to warrant a stop in our fly-by town. He’s still got all the
ticket stubs.
In his manic moods, Dad will crank up the Pink Floyd until
the clocks in “Time” rattle my teeth and the Stones until we’re both right
there strutting with Jagger. Led Zepplin is his favorite, and mine, too. When
I’m depressed, I want to live in the guitar riffs of “When the Levee Breaks”
until it all goes away.
That thunder music has carried us through a lot of silence,
when we otherwise couldn’t say anything without setting each other off. I don’t
know if I ever understood exactly what Dad meant when he played it for me, but
I got what I needed from it and brought it with me when I moved out.
*
I’ve noticed
something alarming happening over the past six or seven years: music is getting
too hard for me.
I don’t mean it’s impossible to stay up on everything
coming out, or to keep my various audio media straight. I mean it’s getting too
emotionally difficult for me to listen to music at all. Most of it, whether I
love it or hate it, makes me physically, painfully weepy.
This could be because of childhood shit catching up to me;
it could be a mutation of whatever lonely impulse made me start listening to
podcasts for more voices in the room after a horrendous breakup. Whatever it
is, it’s had a firm hold on me for half a decade or more.
And somehow, the gym breaks it.
*
The gym we use is
pretty basic—lots of free weights and treadmills mingled with machines that
wouldn’t look out of place in a 1950s health spa. I have no idea what most of
it does.
Over the loudspeakers, they pipe in the local classic rock
station. I know that by now, “local” is an almost useless way to describe it.
Behind the scenes, this one has been gutted and merged into a conglomeration of
its former self, and the few human announcers left are leaving holes for
different advertisers to fill between banter they broadcast to most of the Eastern
Seaboard.
It’s called The Fox, 102.3 FM, sharing exact coordinates
that melts directly into my hometown station somewhere along the straight spit
of interstate that still connects me to my parents. I know I’m close to their
house—I’ve made a recent, conscious decision to stop calling it home—when
someone comes on to rep The Eagle without a hitch in the music. That change
inspires a nugget of dread going one way and of relief going the other.
Now at the gym, surrounded by everyone else’s invisible AirPods
or ironically large BlueTooth headphones, it cracks me open in a way that
hasn’t felt real since high school.
The station has expanded the definition of “classic rock”
as broadly as their airspace. Any song with a guitar solo from the past sixty
years will come up at some point or another in rotation, meaning I hear
everything that spans my entire childhood with no regards to my own personal
chronological order. “No More Mr. Nice Guy” pulls me into a senior year band
trip while “Complicated” tugs me into eighth grade algebra and “All Apologies”
has me wide-eyed on the floor of my college dorm room, understanding its draw
for the first time. Even fucking Journey stirrs something in me -- the part
that found out I love karaoke in my mid-twenties, the part that felt the voices
of a hundred weirdos singing at once vibrating my ribcage and declared it
transcendent.
My whole life flashes between my ears, in manageable
chunks, and I’ve finally found a way to skim off the good parts and enjoy them
wholly for themselves.
Nothing superhuman happens. I can’t magically deadlift
twice my own bodyweight. But something better is happening: I’m having a good
time.
The music flows through me, flowing into the memory grooves
it’s carved into my brains. Now, somehow, I catch it before it floods the
wounds in my heart. I divert it somewhere else, somewhere powerful. Somewhere
all my own.
Image Credit: David Roman Art
MEET THE AUTHOR:
MELANIE
GRIFFIN writes, works in a library, and does research for podcasts. Her work
has been published in a number of local and national publications, most
recently The Mudsill.
