I am busier here than anywhere else in the city this month. So many bodies asking me to be difficult on purpose.
I am holding the barbell, and the plates threaded onto it, and the woman beneath it who has decided that my ordinary pull on forty-five pounds is not enough, so she has stacked more, and looks into the mirror to watch me refuse to give it back easily. I am holding the treadmill belt down against its frame, and the man running on it toward nothing, his feet leaving me and returning, leaving and returning, each landing a small trust he does not know he is placing.
I am holding the water in every bottle, the sweat as it falls, the dropped dumbbell that meets the rubber floor exactly when I said it would.
They come in January carrying something. I have heard them name it: a heavy year, the weight they want to lose, the weight of who they were in December. I checked. The year has no mass. December has no mass. I ran the measurement twice, because they bend under these things so plainly, shoulders rounding, faces set, that I assumed I had simply failed to feel the load.
I had not failed. There is nothing there for me to hold. Whatever bows them is carried somewhere I cannot reach.
So I hold the only things I can. The plate. The step. The tired body that finally lies flat on the mat at the end and lets go of everything at once, breathing, held.
Most of them will stop coming by February. The lockers will empty. The belts will still.
I will still be here. I do not keep the resolution.
I keep the person.