Her refrigerator has seen better days.

A bleak landscape of dannon lites, diet cokes, and whole wheat toast greet her every morning like corpses of a diet revolution. Today she will treat herself to a key lime yogurt. This is because yesterday she had the coconut creme pie flavor and she was disappointed to discover it did not taste like coconut creme pie. She closes the refrigerator door and scans the neon colored schedule taped to her wall. Today she will do Yoga Sculpt. It is her favorite class. She enjoys classes that allow her to meditate and gather her thoughts while also pumping an 8 pound dumb bell over her head.

I’ve never talked to this woman.

But every time I go to the gym, I see her in the corner of the locker room preaching to the other gym devotees about her favorite classes. She’ll tell you the level of difficulty. The instructor’s personality. And even what kind of music they play.

She looks like she’s in her mid thirties, with a thin frame and dark colored hair that is so brittle it makes uncooked pasta look sensuous.

Her acolytes listen attentively. Then they disperse and run off to their jobs and families. Leaving her alone.

The gym is where New Yorkers perform public acts that should be done in the privacy of their bedroom. Wearing spandex. Sweating uncontrollably. Leaving clouds of body odor. Grunting while lifting weights. Performing Squat thrusts.

Of course, I am guilty of all these things.

On a good week, I’ll go to the gym three or four times. With this kind of frequency, I tend to see some of the same characters.

There’s the guy I call Silver Fox because he’s pretty goodlooking and has a head of gray hair. I still can’t tell if he’s gay or straight because I don’t think a straight man would perform leg lifts in public. There is something about a man being on all fours and lifting his foot up to the sky that manages to squash any ounce of heterosexuality.

Then there’s Cell Phone Girl. She garners this nickname because she’s on her cellphone when she’s on the treadmill, lifting free weights, on the machines, and even while doing sit-ups on the mat. I know cell phone girl seems like a pretty obvious nickname for this behavior but I’m not sure what else you would call her. Woman I Hope I Never Have the Unfortunate Chance of Talking To?

Then there are The Workout Buddies. They do their weight routines like synchronized swimmers and discuss their menu plans for the week. FOR THE ENTIRE GYM TO HEAR. These are the type of women that say “carbohydrate” as if they are saying “Osama Bin Laden”. They workout in such precision and go into such detail about their diets that the floor is dripping with their sweat and self loathing.

Despite their devotion, their bodies have not changed at all in the past year. Looks like someone has been sneaking in processed flour.

And finally there’s Gym Crush. He’s cute in that nerdy, I just started to exercise kind of way. We make eye contact all the time and just recently started smiling and saying hello to eachother. This was achieved after a full year. I can tell he’s single because guys in relationships don’t work out with such diligence. I see him staring at me when we are down in the weight room. At first I thought he was checking me out but now I am starting to think it is because I look like an air traffic controller when I am lifting weights. I could safely guide a Boeing Jet to my gym.

Maybe he is checking me out. But I know he’ll never ask me out. Because the gym is the kind of place where we acknowledge eachother’s existence but we also forget there are other people around.

We hog the last pair of five pound weights (Damn you! Whoever you are!) We do splits in the middle of the gym. We recount our diets. We run and sweat next to eachother. We look exactly the same despite the fact that we’d rather go to the gym regularly than a church.

In the end, we go home to an empty fridge.