Day 327 The Plan

Zi has a master plan. 


Or so he tells me when I pick him up (read: drag him out) to work out after work. He's grumpy and bitchy and refuses to leave without a mug of coffee and tries to dissuade me from taking him to the gym by hiking up his shorts to Urkel-esque levels.

I pay for his visitor's fee and he nearly runs out the front door before we even step on a treadmill. He's so not in the mood but I'm determined to get his fatness to burn a few calories before we leave. Five minutes later, I'm on my usual settings and he's glaring at the mechanics of his treadmill with the disdain you usually reserve for lepers.


We talk shit, as usual, and catch up on our otherwise uneventful lives. Well, mine is uneventful: his is lived on the other side of the planet. I've said it before, that I find Zi to be my role model in the focus he has of his goals and his determination to carry them out even if it means moving to another continent. And it's hard, sometimes, to find someone who I can talk to about my love-hate relationship with my work. Everyone can hear me talk about how hard and aggravating I find my work to be, but sometimes I think he's the only one who gets that the far and few feelings of satisfaction I get more than make up for the roughness of it all. 


He gets it... well, he's not being wonderfully emo. 


He tells me about his ten-year-plan, which largely revolves around his goal of graduating med-school and leads up to him eventually coming back to the states to pursue certification here. And as he talks about his problems with maintaining a long-distance relationship within the confines of this ten-year-plan, it strikes me to realize that, while I don't have international love affairs, 


"I think I'm going to spend the rest of my life alone." I confess, kicking up my incline to 10 and lowering  my rate to 3.5. 


Now, normal, sympathetic friends would say something like, "OMG, there's no way that could happen/You'll find happiness one day/You're too awesome to end up alone forever!"


What does Zi say instead? He nods and goes, "Probably."


...And somehow it's not as hurtful as I figured it would be. After my personal trauma, I knew how hard it would be to pursue a working, loving relationship. And, as more time passes, I get the distinct impression that I'm going to be at this place forever. And the more the idea grows, the less it hurts to voice aloud. 


...and it helps me sometimes to think that if someone as awesome and emotionally catatonic as Zi can have faith in a future with someone else someday, maybe I won't be as helpless as I think I will be.