Departure

There's this girl who goes to the same gym I do. Our gym is small, fairly cheap, and in an area with a large student population, and there's a particularly high number of actors and students who use this gym. A few years ago (before joining the gym) I saw a sketch comedy performance with a group who was making fun of yoga. Vaguely amusing, one of the performers was a small Asian-American girl whose body was tiny. She was wearing a leotard and tights so you could see that there was simply no extra meat on her anywhere. And in the sketches, she played a particularly irritating person.

I disliked watching her, and her tiny body made me dislike her even more.

When I started going to this gym, I saw her, recognized who she was from the performance, and began to settle in to my irrational and completely based-on-fiction dislike. And she was in there ALL THE TIME. And she was always using the ellipitcal machine veeerrrrryyyy slowly. Much later it finally occurred to me she probably had it set on a very taxing resistance, meaning her body was working too hard to move quickly, but for some reason the slowness just bugged me.

A year or so ago, I was reading a profile of a young actress in a smash hit of a new play. Now, these make me jealous anyway, because of course I wish *I* could be in a smash hit and had people interview *me*. But suddenly I realized that this must be the girl from the gym. I looked up the production photos online and yep, it was her.

But in the profile, she'd revealed several beguiling and tantalizing pieces of information. She is estranged from her mother - that's word the article used, "estranged", she thought she'd gained weight because she ate incessantly while doing the show, she felt there weren't a lot of roles available to an Asian. I suddenly had a great deal of intimate knowledge about someone I have yet to speak to.

She only rarely irritates me anymore. It's so fascinating, knowing I have a window into who she is (though perhaps a cloudy window - who knows how much the article got right), knowing I have information about her and she has no idea I know these things. And I can see the danger in being a person that gets interviewed, in the paper or anywhere else. When everyone has your secrets at their fingertips, where is your mystery? But it's also true that the information I know now has humanized this person to me, and I find myself sympathetic with her instead of irritated by her.

Which sympathy is equally false, of course, because I don't know her at all.