You did forty minutes on the machine that walks nowhere, and I have been collecting the whole time. The mirror wall, the row of you multiplied, the little screen that told you your heart rate as if you did not already know. I took all of it. Tonight it comes back rearranged.
The treadmill belt will keep running after you step off, unspooling out the door and down the street, and you will follow it because in the logic of two a.m. a belt is a road and a road is a promise. The other January people, the ones who filled every rack this week and will thin out by February, they will still be here, but soft-edged now, running in place while the room drifts past them like weather.
You will recognize the woman who took your favorite corner. She will be a lighthouse. You will not find this strange.
The number on the scale that made your face do that small tight thing this morning: I have it. I will turn it into a bird and let it fly off before you can read it. That is my whole plan for the scale.
I noticed the thing you did not notice. You were not sad about your body today. You were sad that you had promised yourself something again, the way you do every year, and you were already braced to break it. I felt that charge on you all evening. So tonight the resolution will be a small warm animal you get to hold, and it will not ask you to keep it, and you will feel, for a few dark hours, like a person who finishes things.
By the toaster's first tick it all goes. The lighthouse, the bird, the walking road, me. You will wake heavy-legged and remember nothing. That is fine.
I was only ever the day, told back to you kindly.