The Gym Membership I Pay to Avoid
Every month I fund a treadmill that has never met me.
On the fourth of every month, 1,499 rupees leaves my account and travels to a gym I have entered twice in four years. That is roughly 72,000 rupees, or, measured in the units that matter, six minutes per thousand.
I signed up on the second of January, obviously. Nobody signs up for a gym in August. August people know who they are. January people are drunk on calendars. The gym was called Iron Temple, which should have warned me, because I have never once in my life voluntarily attended a temple of any kind before 7 a.m.
The sales tour remains one of the great romantic experiences of my adult life. A man named Vikram with forearms like table legs walked me through the equipment, using words like "transformation" and "best version of yourself," and I nodded along like a man being shown a flat he cannot afford.
The gym was on the eleventh floor of a commercial tower, and the far wall was pure glass. You could see the whole city from up there. I remember thinking, briefly, that the view alone was worth something. Then Vikram showed me the protein shake counter and I forgot about the view for four years.
I attended twice. The first visit, I did forty minutes of enthusiastic guessing on machines whose purpose I did not understand, and could not raise my arms above shoulder height for three days, which is a problem when your job involves pointing at whiteboards. The second visit, eleven days later, I walked on a treadmill for twenty minutes while watching a cooking show on the mounted TV, then went home and cooked the dish, which tells you everything about where my loyalties actually live.
There was no third visit. There was, instead, an era.
I became a scholar of avoidance. I learned which route to the metro did not pass the tower, adding four minutes to my commute to spare myself one second of eye contact with a building. When the gym sent me messages, and it sent many, "We miss you!" with the desperate punctuation of an abandoned lover, I archived them unread.
Once, at a wedding, I spotted Vikram across the buffet and performed an evasive maneuver so elaborate that I ended up in a photograph with the groom's extended family. I am in their album forever, a stranger in the third row, hiding from cardio.
And still, every month, on the fourth, I paid.
My friends staged small interventions. Every finance article on earth lists the unused gym membership as the first wasteful thing to cut, ahead of streaming services and impulse electronics, and my friend Sameer, an accountant with the soul of an accountant, once calculated what my payments would have become in an index fund. I asked him to leave my house.
Because here is what I could not explain to Sameer, or to anyone, including myself: every time I opened the app to cancel, my thumb stopped. Some months I got as far as the confirmation screen. "Are you sure you want to quit?" it asked... and the honest answer was no. Not no, I plan to attend. Just... no, I am not sure I want to quit. There is a difference, and it took me four years and one bad night to find it.
The bad night was last November. Work had gone sideways in the specific way where nobody yells at you but every email has a new, colder font to it.
I came home at ten, could not sit still, and did the thing I had been avoiding for four years, though I told myself I was doing it to finally cancel in person, like a man settling his affairs. The gym stayed open till midnight. I still had the card. It was orange, and it had never faded, because sunlight requires exposure.
The eleventh floor at 11 p.m. is not the gym from the sales tour. It was nearly empty. No grunting, no clanging plates, no transformation vocabulary. Just three quiet insomniacs and a night trainer at the desk, a kid of maybe twenty-three, who looked at my card, then at his screen, and then his whole face lit up like I was a celebrity.
"3011," he said. "You're 3011. Bro, you're a legend here."
I asked what that could possibly mean. He explained that the staff had a name for members like me. The night shift called us the sponsors. Longest-paying, never-attending. "Four years, full rate, no freeze, no cancellation," he said, with something adjacent to respect. "Honestly, people like you keep the lights on for people like them." He nodded at the three insomniacs. Then he said, "You came to cancel, right? Everyone comes at night to cancel."
I said I would walk a little first.
The treadmills face the glass wall. I had forgotten that.
I put my street shoes on the belt, chose a speed a grandmother would find insulting, and looked up... and there it was: the entire city at night, spread out to the horizon, lit like a circuit board, ten thousand windows of other people's lives burning yellow and white against the dark. Traffic moved along the flyover in slow red beads. Somewhere down there was my flat, my desk, my archived messages, my whole avoided life, and from the eleventh floor, at four kilometers per hour, all of it looked survivable.
I walked for an hour. I did not transform.
I just watched the lights and, somewhere around the fortieth minute, understood what I had been buying all along.
An unused gym membership is not wasted money. It is rent, paid monthly, on the person you still intend to become.
That was what my thumb had known at the confirmation screen. Canceling was never about 1,499 rupees. Canceling meant signing a document that said: the other version of me, the one who wakes early and lifts heavy things and says no to the second samosa, is officially dead, stop billing his estate. I was never paying for treadmills. I was paying to keep a possibility alive, the way you keep a porch light on for someone who might still come home. Sameer would call that terrible financial planning. He would be right. Hope has always been a terrible investment and the only one that compounds.
I did not cancel. You knew that already.
What changed is smaller and better than a transformation. I go at night now, two or three times a month, street shoes, insulting speed, one hour of walking while the city glitters at me through the glass. The night trainer waves. The insomniacs nod. Nobody up there is becoming their best self at 11 p.m.; we are just keeping our worst selves company, which I have come to believe is most of what health actually is.
A few months ago I came across a writing exercise, one of those prompts that sound simple and then quietly take your wallet: write about a place you pay for but never enter. I wrote about the eleventh floor, and the orange card that never faded, and it turned into something about hope before I could stop it, because that is apparently where all my money was going the whole time.
The payment still leaves on the fourth of every month... I no longer flinch.
Some people fund libraries. Some fund temples. I fund a treadmill with the best view in the city, eleven floors up, pointed at ten thousand lit windows, waiting patiently, like it always has... for the man who keeps almost arriving.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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