Your Surrender

Your Surrender

Let’s set the stage, help you envision the scene.

You feel yourself squirming a little lately, spiritually speaking.  It’s not ideal.  The town in which you live is small enough that your past washes up on the shores of the present every day, a little bit.  You used to have a little too much fun with drugs and alcohol.  Maybe you were a little too outgoing.  Maybe you’re a different person now, slightly, but your ghost hangs around and haunts you.

You’re not proud of your past.  In fact, you’re a future-forward kind of guy.  You have a nostalgia for a past you’ve never lived.  You reason that if you had a different past - different actions, different environments, different habits - you’d be inhabiting a different present.  You’d be a different person.

When you sigh, it’s a big, gusty thing that seems to sweep out the darkest corners of your body.  The time has come and gone to do something about it.  So you move, at his instruction.  Your ears bend to his words, and your brain concedes control to your dick.  He makes you so hard, the way he talks to you.  Your interests parallel.  You have long, engaging conversations that verge on intellectual, sometimes, about the nature of transformation and what you truly want from life.  As the months roll, you grow closer and closer to him.  You talk to him on the phone three, four times a day.  You don’t always remember everything, but you know that he has some kind of power, some kind of power over you, and you thrill to it.

You obey the call.  You surrender, and you do it, for the first time, without hesitation.  He’s just … different, somehow.  He resonates.

Like many, you made a New Year’s Resolution.  You’re a Resolutioner.  You’re part of that dreaded herd that swarms the gyms on 2 January, at least on the surface level.  As February comes and goes, March swirls angrily by and leaves April shuddering in its wake.  The warmth seeps up from below.  You feel the world changing around you, and its voice is inviting you to do the same.  Change.  Evolve.  The whispers in the wind are seductive, beguiling.  They seep in through the bedroom’s open window as you lay there, waking.

And it’s that time of the year, too.  The winter’s lacquer of snow & ice has finally shattered, and the sun strobes strongly through more hours of the day.  When you wake up in the morning, the outside world is airily infiltrating your bedroom through the open window.  Instead of groping through a charcoal void, your skin prickling with cold, your eyes snap open and your mouth curves into a satisfied, relaxed smile.  You test your muscles with a stretch, hearing the joints pop and the sinews sing against the bone.  

You do not lay in bed alone.  His voice is there, too.  And his body, his hands.  He slaps your up-turned ass - hard - and says quietly, “Mine.”  And it’s a joke, but it’s not a joke, too.  “Gym time, boy,” he says, and you know it’s true.  When he speaks, it’s invariable, immutable, fixed.  There’s a certain iron cast to the words - when he wants there to be - and they crash down like a portcullis.  It’s gym time.

You’ve taken to the routine.  You’ve always been a creature of habit.  Conscientious to a fault, perhaps just a little too neat.  You like things just so, but sometimes fret over the idiot details.  He’s helping you with this.  It’s kind of him.  He’s helping you to unwind the invisible wires around your brain - to be less conscious of every single thing around you.  Or, if not less conscious, to be a little more dismissive of the idiot details.  He’s teaching you how to paint with broad strokes, rather than scribbling in the margins with a fine-tip pen.  This appeals to you.  Your stride gets longer.  Your eyes fix on objects in the distance.

Especially muscles.  Your eyes are drawn to them.  Now that you live in the Big City, you take long walks when you could take the subway, just so you can see more.  Now that the days are warmer and less insulation is required, you can see the results of the efforts of the guys around you.  How they adorn their work with swirls of black ink, or how they wear their favorite brands.  How they hide their eyes behind mirrored shades.  And when you see them, you start to follow them.  It’s not unnatural - just a guy walking behind a guy for a little while.  It’s a big city.  No one notices.  And the entire time, you feel this sharp, twisting pang in your deepness, and you feel yourself shifting in your shorts.  Your basketball shorts, the ones that he picked out for you that morning.  You haven’t chosen your own clothing now in months, and it hasn’t really occurred to you - but that’s just one of those idiot details that isn’t necessary for you to focus on.  The second you even consider it, it’s gone, like ash tumbling through the air.

You’ve become quietly covetous.  The first place your eyes fall when you see another guy is the place on their bicep where the sleeve falls.  Even better if the entire peak is displayed, from the small cannonball of the deltoid down to the olecranon of the elbow.  Next, if available, the etched diamond of the calf muscle.  Even better if the shorts fall just above the kneecap, displaying the firm teardrop of the vastus medialis.

And you see?  In your covetousness, you’ve eagerly sought out the information necessary.  What these muscles are called.  How to name them.  The deltoids.  The biceps.  The biceps femoris.  The quadriceps.  The abdominals, the serratus.  The pectorals.  You’ve become a student of the male body - and your major is the muscles.  You hungrily seek out this information.  Again, you’d stop to ask why, but that’s just one of those idiot details.  Your broad strokes of thought boldly wash out those hesitant, pencil-like scrawlings.  

Your conversation shifts, too.  Your remarks, even just the little off-cuff remarks you make to co-workers, are about your newfound interest.  You might even tentatively complain a little, about your sore quads, or how your pecs feel so full, but so tight, since yesterday was chest day, bro.

Let’s take a break.  You have the tableau, you see the players.  One of those players is, in fact, you.  Big picture.  And the other, well, he’s grinning just out of the corner of your eye, when you lay together, spent & exhausted on the bedspread.  You might even be covered in cum, but you’re laughing, a big gusty sound that originates from down in your chest - actually, come to think of it, where most of your sound comes from these days.  You’ve been feeling yourself expanding, somehow.  Slowly, but surely.

Is this magic?

You tell me.

You’re lying there, next to him.  You play your hands over the contours of his muscles.  He loves it when you knead into his rhomboids, his lats.  You’re kept in a slight state of astonishment whenever you see his chest.  He likes it that way.  Flexes for you, with his eyes and grin fixed on yours.  Later, he’ll cinch the measuring tape around your waist, around your chest, tug it tight around your bicep.  And you’ll flex, and you’ll laugh.  Because you know that number is gonna get higher, and higher, just as maybe your IQ number might be getting a little lower.

Somewhere inside of your skull, that little scratching sound, that pencil cribbing in the margins, is worrying over that detail.  You can hear it, but just like living in the Big City, there’s always some kind of noise, some kind of static.  As easily as a gnat at your ear, you whisk it away with an absent-minded dismissal.  Because

“Gym time, boy.”  And the seriousness of his words expand in the air, creating an invisible push at the small of your back.  You go together, and he observes, and he watches.  He corrects your form.  Sometimes you spot one another on the bench.  You workout until you both shake with effort and hunger.  And probably a little from that bomb-ass pre-workout, too.  Damn, does that shit fizz in the veins.  And it makes the veins pop, too!  You love marvelling at the way your veins pop out against your growing bicep.  You love the comments people give, those commonplace “Wow!  You’ve been working out, huh?”  

“Sure,” you grunt in modest reply, and flex, perhaps a little conspiratorially, like you’re sharing a secret with this awed co-worker.  And one day, you might notice out of the corner of your eye, this guy that’s kinda been following you for a block or two.  

Full circle, bro.  You might be just aware of the eyes prickling against your skin.  The way your shorts and Chicago Bulls jersey fall on your frame.  You’ve long since ditched the glasses, and you sport shades now - mirrored ones, like aviators.  Just like everything else you’re wearing, he picked it out.

At the crosswalk, the little orange hand turns solid and you come to a stop.  You are tired from your workout, but not too tired to stretch, turning that stretch into a surreptitious flex.  You might even lower your shades and wink at the guy you feel gaping at you, trying successfully to blend into the crowd of other normal people.  How badly you want to warn him - no, not warm him, haha, what the hell would you be warning the little dude about?  More like, you wanna turn around and be like BRO, JUST LIFT and see the reality registering in his eyes, see him start to change too.  See him start to expand, see his chin lift, see the ink - just like yours, big tribals, so much depth, you could stare for hours - just materialize on his skin.

And maybe he does.  Maybe that poor, shrimpy onlooker with more weight in his skull than muscles on his bones feels that subtle, shifting wind.  Maybe he, too, inhales - inhales deeper than he ever has before, scours out the basement of his body with his breath, and lets it out in a huge, gusty exorcism.  Maybe he turns the corner and puts pen to paper at the front counter, and finds himself waking up in the morning with new ideas, thoughts, plans, goals.  

Maybe you’re contagious.  That thought makes you laugh - it’s really more a guffaw, now, this deep sort of chuckle that makes you sound a little bone-headed.  Like maybe lifting is catching, bro.  How sweet would that be?

And the future is still ahead of you, though you don’t pay it much mind.  You follow the street home to him, to his words, to his gaze, to his arms around your body.  To the murmurs you’ll forget as he talks you down, smiling at you the whole time.

It isn’t magic, because there’s no such thing as magic, right?  But it’s close enough to be effective, so maybe it is.  

Anyway, if he told you there was such a thing as magic, you’d believe him.

You’d believe anything.