How generous of them, to gather in one warm room and breathe so much moisture into the air.
I moved in during the first week, when the crowd was thickest. Every one of the soft ones came at once, panting, dripping, pressing their damp palms into the black rubber handles, leaving behind the sugar of themselves in a fine invisible film. They think they are building. I know better.
They are seeding. A locker room is simply a garden they refuse to admit is a garden: the standing warmth, the tile grout holding its little rivers, the towel left balled in a bag overnight, the bench underneath the bench where the spray bottle never reaches. I am already in the corner of the shower, faint and green as a whisper.
I am patient. I have all winter.
They wipe the machines with those small blue sheets and feel clean, and I love them for it, the way you love a child sweeping back the tide. Wipe the top. I live in the seam. Wipe the seam. I live in the padding. They come in January full of resolve, certain that this is the year they stop softening, stop slowing, stop returning to what they were.
Adorable. Everything returns to what it was. That is the only promise the world keeps.
By February the crowd thins and the room goes quiet, and I am not disappointed. I was never here for the crowd. I was here for the damp they leave, the sugar they forget, the corners they will always, always miss. They lock the doors at night thinking they have kept something out.
They have only sealed me in with everything I have been promised.