Explode

I can lift 168% of my bodyweight now, a friend is telling me. We're talking about how good it feels after you've just worked out, and he's updating me on his results. When I quit lifting freshman year of high school, I say, I was up to 154%.

Damn dude, he says, you would have been pimp if you hadn't stopped.

Would have been what? A behemoth who didn't have to talk my way out of anything or have any clue if female interest in me was at all intellectual. Someone who could smile now and then and treat people like garbage and still get what I wanted, rather, what others usually wanted. That's fine, I don't need to be "pimp." I don't do it so skanks will throw their nasty vaginas in my face, I do it because it is the closest feeling to pure ecstasy, either physical or mental, that is attainable through physical action.

It's like an addiction, though, and I push too hard. I run faster than my body knows how for longer than my heart can maintain. I mean to go for ten minutes, and forty later my vision blurs away and I rip the safety strip off to stop the mill.

I feel like I'm going to vomit. I feel like my heart is going to explode. My veins are on fire, my head is throbbing, and I have to sit down and lean against the bars of the mill to keep from passing out. It's like a painful orgasm, but much better, and thirty seconds later I'm back on the belt. This time I set it for stamina instead of aerobic and sprint until my legs lock up. I try to walk down the stairs and, disoriented, fall into walls and clutch the rails.

I smile and shut my eyes as my heart tries to pound its way out of my ribs. At that moment, nothing in the world matters but the ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum in my chest and the pulsating blood in my legs. I feel the muscles tighten as they lift me over each step. I feel them grow stronger and tighter every day.

With the heightened state of mental clarity that comes along with the leftover adrenaline, I find myself at home in the shower. By now I can barely stand. My side aches, my knees hurt, and it feels like I bruised one of the bones in my feet. But the next day I will ignore the pain and run until my vision blurs and my heart misses that crucial beat.

I'll do it because in that shower with that sense of being, I realize what I will become. My almost inhuman patience has been the last bit of my human self, the only thing that's distinguished me to any extent. Running into an old friend, she'll say again, "Is that you? I didn't recognize you...again. You look so different every time I see you." I'll smile, not from any pleasure in seeing her, but having gotten the exact reaction I'd been hoping for.

I'll do it because in that shower, I envision a future where I'm leaving the heartless, arrogant, self-absorbed fucks that I've been surrounded by my whole life and been so patiently waiting and doting on behind. It's not only my muscles I feel tightening, it's my grip on my life, and I will choke every last bead of sweat from its pores.

I am not expanding my capacity to run or lift. I'm not expanding my abilities in strength or well-being. I am merely expanding my power of will, and the ability to use my Roman rhetoric to couple that will and power of speech to form the most powerful weapon at my disposal.

There is no such thing as a life of importance. There is, however, such thing as a life of dominance.

Because my desires are few, it will be much easier to ensure that they are all fulfilled.