At the gym they changed the changing rooms. The women are in the men's quarters and the men get to enjoy separate showers for a day. I don't know why they do this, but it happens about twice a year. Perhaps it is to shake things up a little. Too see how many people will walk into the wrong change-room out of habit.
So after pretending to work out and sculpt my muscles, I head back to the changing rooms. In the ladies' one, the main room is separated into segments by placing the lockers in an E shape. So if you want to, no one can see you go from sweaty to sexy. Also, there are individual showers with swing doors, so even there you are only visible as a shadow through the opaque plastic-glass.
The men's changing rooms are vastly different : the man room is the same size as the women's room, but the lockers are all pressed to the walls, and the benches are in the middle of the room, so there is nowhere to hide. Further, the showers are basically one room with ten shower heads. It is like prison. Or my idea of showers in prison.
So sneaked in and saw a handful of elderly ladies lounging around on the benches, showing off sagging flesh and humanity at its barest. Because I was clothes and wore a bra, I felt very superior. I discarded my clothes quietly in the farthest corner whilst draping my enormous towel around me and managed to constantly hide the middle square of my body from their view. I did this to not make them jealous, you know, I did not want them to feel bad for not looking as smoking hot as me. No, in truth, I just don't like being naked. Especially not in front of people.
The African ladies seem to have no problem with this: they will parade around their shape, spending ages lathering on different creams and wrapping their bodies in cellophane. Then they will again spend hours sweating naked in the sauna or the steam room, sitting on the tiniest towels.
I admire this pride : to be comfortable in one's body, to be able to walk around in the nude, unaffraid of judgement. Maybe that is the irony: in youth skin and flesh is still usually firm, but one is unsure of its attraction and thus tries to hide it. In old age one has lived enough not to care about the bodies changes, even when everything droops and gravity is proven true.
So there I am, cloaked like Gandalf in my grey towel, shuffling stealthily to the showers, where to my surpise I only see the one room. Thank the higher powers I was the only one there, so I quickly got clean and enrobed myself in the towel again.
When I returned to the main room, I witnessed a most positive moment :
an older white lady, presumably in her seventies, hunched over, with short dark grey hair and a face like a boxer approached a couple of black ladies, getting dressed to go back to work. She was walking towards them in her humongous white bloomers, with sagging flesh oozing out of them .
She then asked one of the two ladies to put cream on her back. A simple thing. The lady obliged kindly and smeared the cream all over, even massaging it in. I, with my judgement, would have been disgusted by this task, this idea of rubbing old skin and muscles to weak to hold the old lady up straight. I would have done it out of courtesy, but would have resented her for asking me to do such a task. And I would have slapped the stuff on in seconds, trying to minimise the amount of contact my hands would have with her back.
Then I realized my arrogance and admired both women greatly : the one for embracing her body and the other for not caring what that body looked like, for being willing to perform a small task in order to provide some happiness to a stranger. They both taught me that humanity has different forms and that a mindset corrupted by Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated ideals of what one should look like needs to change quickly.
So I dropped my towel.
.
