I wake up at five-thirty without an alarm.
Not because I'm disciplined. It's more that my body stopped asking permission somewhere around year two and just decided that five-thirty is when things start.
The same way it decided that chicken breast is a food group and that the ache in my left hip is something to train around rather than stop for.
You spend enough years listening to your body and eventually it stops being a conversation. It just tells you things and you nod along.
I lie there for a moment in the dark, staring at the ceiling. Not thinking about anything in particular.
Just confirming that yes, I'm awake, and no, there is no version of this morning where I roll over and go back to sleep. I get up.
February is cold in Tokyo. Specifically and personally cold, the kind that comes up through the floor and reminds you that slippers are a sensible invention that you continue to not own.
I pad into the kitchen, fill the kettle, open the refrigerator. My meal prep containers are stacked in two neat rows.
I did them on Sunday, like I always do, seven days of the same breakfast and lunch and dinner with minor variations that I tell myself constitute variety.
Tuesday morning is oats, protein powder, half a banana. I eat standing at the counter because sitting down feels like I'm settling in for something slower than I want to be.
I eat. I rinse the container. I put it in the drying rack.
I check my training log while I drink my coffee, not because I've forgotten what's on it, I know exactly what's on it, but because reading the numbers settles something in me.
The same way some people read the news in the morning.
Today is a max effort squat day. The programme says to work up to a heavy single. The heavy single is two hundred and forty kilograms.
I've hit two-thirty-five before. It moved well. Two-forty is the next number on the list and I have been pointing at it for three weeks.
I finish the coffee. I look out the window at the street below, still dark, the only light coming from the convenience store on the corner, its sign buzzing quietly into the pre-dawn like it's the last thing awake in the city.
I feel good. Not electric, not buzzing with anticipation, just good, in the calm and certain way you feel when you've prepared properly and you know it. The weight is there. I am here. The distance between us is something I know how to close.
I pick up my bag. I go.
It is a twenty-minute walk to the gym and I do it every morning regardless of weather because the walk is part of the routine and the routine is what holds everything else together.
February means it is dark when I leave and barely light when I arrive.
The city wakes up around me in pieces on the way, a convenience store clerk restocking the drinks fridge, a salaryman standing very still on a station platform, a cat sitting on top of a wall watching me pass with the expression of something that has been here much longer than I have and intends to be here much longer still.
I nod at the cat out of habit. The cat does not acknowledge this. We have been doing this for three years.
The gym smells like chalk and old rubber and the specific quality of air that comes from a room where a lot of people have sweated for a long time.
It is not a smell that would sell memberships. I love it unreservedly.
It means the work is about to start, and the work starting is genuinely the best part of my day, not in a sad way, or not only in a sad way.
In the way that some people feel walking into a kitchen or sitting down at a piano. The place where I make sense.
It's early enough that it's quiet. A few regulars scattered around, the older man who does the same cable row programme every Tuesday with the focus and consistency of someone completing a sacred ritual, the university kid who appears to believe that chest day occurs seven days a week, the woman three platforms down who has been working on her deadlift for eight months with a patience I respect more than I've ever told her.
We don't talk. We nod. That's the five-thirty language and it's sufficient.
I change. I wrap my wrists. I start with the empty bar the way I always start with the empty bar, moving through the warm-up in stages, forty, sixty, one hundred, one-forty, one-eighty, two-ten.
The weight gets heavier and my body gets warmer and by the time I'm loading two-twenty the gym has filled enough that the background noise has shifted from silence to that low, comfortable hum of plates and effort and people concentrating.
Two-twenty. One rep. Easy.
Two-thirty-five. One rep. Heavy but honest, the kind of heavy that still belongs to you.
I stand with my hands on the bar for a moment afterward and breathe.
My heart is working.
My legs feel solid.
Everything that is supposed to be warm is warm.
I look at the bar.
Two-forty.
I load the last plates. Check the clips. Step back. There is a moment, just a moment, where I look at what I've built and feel something simple and complete.
No noise in my head. No doubt. Just the number, and the bar, and six years of mornings exactly like this one that have been quietly adding up to exactly this.
I chalk my hands.
I step under the bar.
The last thing I feel is the bar.
Cold steel across my back, two hundred and forty kilograms of it, perfectly positioned the way I've positioned it a hundred times before. Hands chalked. Belt set. Three deep breaths, hold on the third. Everything correct.
Everything exactly as it should be.
I descend.
The flutter is so small I almost miss it.
Not exertion — I know what exertion feels like. This is something else. A small, wrong skipping sensation in the centre of my chest, like a single missed step in a staircase you've walked a thousand times.
I register it distantly, the way you register something unfamiliar before you understand what it is, and then, the pain arrives and understanding is no longer necessary.
It comes from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, radiating outward from my chest in a cold wave that my brain cannot process fast enough to name. My left arm disappears , not pain exactly, just absence, the signals cutting out all at once.
The bar tilts. I cannot correct it. My legs, which have held this weight before and will never hold anything again, stop receiving instructions.
The floor comes up faster than seems fair.
I am twenty-three years old. I am dying on a Tuesday morning in a gym in Tokyo and I haven't even racked the bar yet and I had a competition in six weeks and there is a meal prep container in my bag with my name written on the lid in marker and the last coherent thought I manage before the pain takes everything is so small and so specific that it almost makes me want to laugh,
I should have taken the deload week.
The mind doesn't stop cleanly. I know this now.
I'm on the floor. I can't feel the floor but I know I'm on it.
The ceiling above me is an off-white I have stared at for three years and never once actually looked at, and now I am looking at it , really looking, cataloguing it like it matters, the water stain in the corner and the flickering fluorescent light that has been broken for six months and that I never reported and that nobody fixed and that is the only thing moving in my entire field of vision.
Someone is shouting. It sounds like it's coming from the end of a very long corridor.
I try to move.
I try very sincerely and nothing happens. My hands are still chalked, that I can feel, the dry graininess of it against my palms, and I find this quietly absurd.
Everything else has gone but the chalk is still there.
The chalk and the ceiling and the broken light and somewhere behind me two hundred and forty kilograms sitting in a rack that I loaded myself this morning with every intention of putting back.
Someone says my name. It comes through like a voice through water, I can tell it's my name, I can't quite hold onto it.
My chest rises once.
It does not fall.
The fluorescent light pulses, once, twice and then, for the first time in six months, holds completely steady.
Brighter than it has any right to be. Flooding the ceiling with a flat, clean white that washes out the water stain and the off-white and all the small imperfections I spent three years staring at without ever seeing.
Just white.
Still and complete and very quiet.
I close my eyes, and everything turns dark.