Today feels weird. Feels like I'm pressing my nose and forehead against a perspex wall, looking in at a sweaty, knackered, pathologically miserable, calorifically haunted version of myself chained to a bike, and not really daring to laugh. As though the perspex is softening, and melting as I push my face against it, trying to see some glimmer of happiness in the sweaty me's eyes. And just as I think I can't see it, that it's not even there to be seen, he looks up, and there it is. The smile of Getting Healthy. The smile of pulling jeans off the shelf at at least reasonably trendy stores and meeting the sales clerk's eyes defiantly, not defensively. The smile of looking forward to annual doctors' appointments because he's greeted with smiles and laughs and "My-word-you've-done-so-well". And the perspex continues to melt, till my nose pokes through into his world of hard work, self-denial, self-improvement and ability to Do Stuff. The perspex pulls at my fingers, and I can't let it go, and suddenly it's like a scene from a 70s sci-fi. I struggle to pull myself away from the melting perspex, but my hairy belly's stuck to it...stuck in it...and the melt continues, wrapping around my feet and tripping me up, and in an instant - a twelve-hour instant - I'm in his world and I can't get out again. It's like he won't let me out again, or like some Bill Murray movie where I can only get out again when I am the sweating, healthy man on the bike. The man with the smile.
"About bloody time," he mutters. "I'm off for a curry."
And off he jolly well fucks, through the melted perspex, leaving me staring in horrified resignation at the bike he's vacated, which seems to grow larger as I look at it. And I nod, alone in this perspex bubble, with just the bike and the promise of pain and hard work.
And then I get on my bike. It becomes my bike, because it has a prescription for the future of me. And as the vision begins to fade, I begin to peddle, lacklustre at first, then growing in speed as we fade out...
To leave me in Starbucks at Paddington Station.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow is Re-Perspex Day.
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