I’m sitting here in the dark again. 2:14 AM. The house smells like bleach and old age, and I can hear Harold’s oxygen concentrator humming in the other room—thump, hiss, thump, hiss. It’s the rhythm of my cage. I’ve been his primary caregiver for six years, three months, and eleven days. Do you have any idea what that does to a man? To have your entire existence reduced to a schedule of medications and bedpans? I’m seventy-one. I should be fishing in Cabo. Instead, I’m staring at my own wrinkled hands and wondering when it became my job to carry every single person in this family on my back while I disappear into the floorboards. I’m sick of it. I’m just plain sick of it. I keep thinking about the year I turned seventeen. It was Thanksgiving. My mother had been in the kitchen since five in the morning, the whole house smelled like sage and heavy cream and that heavy, cloying scent of family expectation. My brothers were in the living room, probably drinking the good bourbon they thought Dad didn’t know about. And where was I? I wasn’t there. I told them I was going for a walk. A walk. What a joke. I went to the old YMCA downtown. I had a key because I swept the floors on weekends. It was empty. Cold. The pipes were clanking like they were about to burst—BANG, hiss, BANG. I spent four hours in that basement. Four hours. I wasn't just lifting; I was hunting for something. I can still feel the iron in my palms, that dry, metallic stink that never really leaves your skin. I did three hundred reps on the bench. Then three hundred more. My chest felt like it was going to split open. Was it insane? Probably. Does everyone have that moment where they just want to be bigger than their own life? I looked in that cracked mirror under the flickering fluorescent bulb and I pulled out the yellow sewing tape I’d stolen from my mother’s basket. The one with the little silver tip. Fifteen and seven-eighths inches. That’s what the tape said. I wrapped it around my right bicep so tight it left a red welt. I needed it to be sixteen.