Where: Palmetto State University Athlete’s Gym Date: Sunday, October 14th Time: 8:16 PM Status: Closed to @summermyburgh
Sometimes weekends don’t have enough physical in them.
It used to happen during high school, too, when the hours of sitting in class and the meager three hours of afterschool practice didn’t quite add up to the amount of energy that Sterling had become accustomed to expending in a single day. Days at the commune had been long and physically demanding, and that had become the norm - he’d adjusted like a plant adapts to the amount of light it’s exposed to in order to keep from withering. There was too much left inside him at the end of the day, and he’d had to find some way to get it out.
Days when they don’t have practice feel the same now - in the absence of something to drain him, hollow him out to exhaustion, he has to seek it out.
This is more than that, though. Today hasn’t dragged enough out of him to take the anger with it. He knows full well that they hadn’t really had a good chance against the Ravens on Friday, but it hadn’t stopped hope from growing in him, stubborn, a dandelion up through the concrete. And it certainly hasn’t stopped him from being angry about the disgrace of a loss that happened on Friday.
Boxing asks a lot of him - takes and takes his energy and his rage and the fight inside of him, saps it greedily, leaves the easy burn of well-exerted muscles in their place. There are times when a bag isn’t enough, though, and Friday’s left the kind of anger in him that isn’t satisfied with inanimate objects.
He spots Summer at one of the other bags hanging at various points around the room, some of them swinging from the efforts of other people getting their Sunday workout in before the gym closes at 10. There’s something in the way he stands, the strain in his shoulders, that tells Sterling there’s something inside him that needs out, too.
“Hey, Myburgh,” he says, flexing one wrapped hand, the boxing glove tucked under his arm, “you wanna hold mitts for each other? Let you go first.”