Everyday as I step on the treadmill and increase the speed slowly from 6 km/hr to 10 km/hr, my heart-beat races. Sometime later pain starts from the ankle and spreads to thigh muscles and soon the whole body aches. It begs to stop or at least reduce the speed. Heart beats as if it is going to pump all the blood and burst open.

Every part of the body starts to feel the pain. It isn’t easy to bear the pain, day after day.

Being trim, slim and slender is just one part of the story.

This physical pain helps me forget a greater pain – the pain of the tornado tearing me emotionally; the embracement of wrong decisions; the aches of being just a ‘passing cloud’; the disappointment of thousands of expressed and the other millions of unexpressed expectations; the agony of struggle between staying good and throwing everything out of the window.

When I step out of the treadmill, nearly fatigued, a pleasure, though sadistic, blooms inside – pleasure of beating oneself. A punishment to for all the wrong decisions made and the right decisions that didn’t get made.

Every sweat bead is an unshed tear drop.*

* Like yesterday night, there are many days that I feel so heavy and want to cry aloud. But no tear drop comes out of the heavy heart. Only way to compensate is either to run longer or at a faster pace or both. Today morning I did both.