No one knew exactly when it happened.
One day Miro called out as he entered the gym, “Hey, Bart!” and no one found it strange. The others took it up within a few days just as naturally as if he had always been called that. Bartholomew did not protest. He even caught himself several times, when introducing himself to new people, almost automatically starting with the words: “I’m Bart.” Only afterwards did he realise he had not spoken his full name at all. It did not seem important. Bart was shorter. Simpler. It suited the man he was becoming.
The gym had long since ceased to be merely a place where he went to train. It was his second home. He knew the regulars by name, knew who came in the mornings, who in the evenings, who was preparing for competitions and who was simply trying to lose weight. People with whom he had had nothing to say only a few months earlier had become his everyday company. They talked about training, recovery, food, new exercises or planned contests. When the conversation turned to books, politics or language, Bart usually stayed silent. Not because he could not answer. Those topics simply felt increasingly distant.
His body was changing at a pace that was becoming hard to overlook. Every morning while dressing he felt that his T-shirts sat a little differently than the week before. His shoulders filled the fabric, the sleeves stretched across his arms and his back was gaining a width it had never had. Yet he felt none of the fatigue or pain that should have accompanied such rapid growth. Recovery was almost unbelievable. The day after a heavy session he felt like lifting even more.
His beard thickened almost before his eyes. The moustache was beginning to join the hair on his cheeks, and a continuous growth was forming under his chin. Every shave lasted a shorter time than the previous one. One evening after a shower he remained standing in front of the mirror a little longer. A darker band of hair already ran across his chest, and when he turned sideways he caught sight in the reflection of several new clusters on his shoulders. A few days later he discovered the first more pronounced hair on the upper part of his back as well. He ran a hand over it and simply shrugged.
“Dad was hairy too,” he muttered to himself.
That explanation was entirely enough for him.
His work email was beginning to resemble an archive more than a living inbox. Several clients followed up again; one even asked whether everything was all right. Bart replied briefly, apologised and wrote that he was not accepting new commissions at the moment. When he sent the message he felt neither relief nor regret. He simply closed the laptop and opened the diary.
This time the exercises did not interest him.
He leafed through the pages slowly and read paragraphs he already knew almost by heart.
*A strong body is the foundation of a strong life.*
*Don’t waste energy on things that don’t move you forward.*
*People will recognise your worth by actions sooner than by words.*
Those sentences had been there since the first day.
Yet each time they meant something slightly different.
Previously he had looked for motivation in them.
Now he found confirmation of what he already felt.
One afternoon he sat with Miro over coffee after training. They were talking about a new machine the gym was supposed to order when Miro mentioned an article in some sports magazine.
“You studied Czech, right? What’s it called when an author deliberately uses the same motif at the beginning and at the end of a book?”
He had used it for years.
Yet the word would not come.
Instead he felt only an unpleasant emptiness.
His mind was completely blank.
For the first time in a long while he was truly frightened.
How could he have forgotten something so ordinary?
Only a few months earlier he had been correcting diploma theses. Students had paid him for spotting mistakes like that. And now he could not recall a single technical term.
“Doesn’t matter,” Miro waved it away. “It’s not important anyway.”
They started talking about deadlifts.
After about five minutes he realised he was no longer thinking about the forgotten word at all.
And when he fell asleep that evening, he did not remember it even once.
